towards an exakte kunstwissenschaft’(?)* a report on some ... · actual style of writing and of...

Journal of Art Historiography Number 9 December 2013

Towards an ‘exakte Kunstwissenschaft’(?)*

A report on some recent German books on the progress of mid-

19th century art history.

Part I: Work by German art historians on nineteenth Century art-

historiography since 2000:

Review of:

Wojciech Bałus and Joanna Wolańska, eds., Die Etablierung und Entwicklung

der Kunstgeschichte in Deutschland, Polen und Mitteleuropa (establishing and

developing the history of art in Germany, Poland and Central Europe; also a

Polish title), Warsaw: Instytut Sztuki PAN 2010

Gabriele Bickendorf, ‘Die Berliner Schule …’, in: Pfisterer, Klassiker, vol. 1,

2007, 46-61

Gabriele Bickendorf, ‘Die ersten Überblickwerke zur Kunstgeschichte (the

first survey works on the history of art). D’Agincourt, Lanzi, Fiorillo,

Cicognara’, in Pfisterer, Klassiker, vol. 1, 2007, 20-45

In der Mitte Berlins (in the Centre of Berlin). 200 Jahre Kunsgeschichte an der

Humboldt-Universtät, Horst Bredekamp and Adam S. Labuda, eds., Berlin:

Mann, 2010

Franz Theodor Kugler, Deutscher Kunsthistoriker und Berliner Dichter (poet),

Michel Espagne and Bénédicte Savoy, Céline Traiutmann-Waller, eds. Berlin:

Akademie Verlag, 20101

Karin Hellwig, Von der Vita zur Künstlerbiographie (from the via to the artist‘s

biography), Berlin Akadmie Verlag 2005

Henrik Karge, ‘Carl Schnaase. Die Entfaltung der wissenschaftlichen

Kunstgeschichte in 19. Jahrhundert’ (the development of scientific art history

in the 19th century), Kunsthistorische Arbeitsblätter, 2001, 7/8, 87 –100

Henrik Karge, ‘Zwischen Naturwissenschaft und Kunstgeschichte. Die

Entfaltung des Systems der Epochenstile im 18. Und fruhen 19. Jahrhundert’

(between the natural sciences and art history; the development of the system

of style-labels /labels tied to/ epochs in the 18th and early 19th centuries), in

Bruno Klein and Bruno Boerner, Stilfragen zur Kunst des Mittelaters. Eine

Einführung, Berlin: Reimer 2006, 39-60

The author wishes to thank the Library of The Warburg Institute in London and the Kuntsbibliothek in

Berlin for their unfailing help. The title is a paraphrase of Locher’s characterisation of Rumohr’s work

as ‘einer exakt und empirisch arbeitenden [working] historischen Wissenschaft’, Locher, 228.

1 See also the review by Eric Garberson in Journal of Art Historiography no. 5, 2011 and Michel Espagne,

Dictionnaire des historiens d'art allemands 1750-1950, Paris: CNRS 2010.

Stefan Muthesius Towards an ‘exakte Kunstwissenschaft‘(?)

2

Henrik Karge, ‘Franz Kugler und Carl Schnaase. Zwei Projekte zur

Etablierung der “Allgemeinen (general) Kunstgeschichte’” in Michel

Espagne, Kugler, 2010, 83-104

Henrik Karge, Stilgeschichte versus Kulturgeschichte Zur Entfaltung der

kunsthistorischen Methodik in den Jahrzehnten ab 1850 (history of style

versus history of culture. The development of art historical methods in the

decades form 1850), in Balus, Wolanska, Etablierung, 2010, 41-60

Henrik Karge, ‘Einleitung’ to reprint of Carl Schnaase, Niederländische Briefe

(Stuttgart und Tübingen: Cotta 1834), Hildesheim: Olms-Weidmann 2010

Hubert Locher, Kunstgeschichte als historische Theorie der Kunst, 1750-1950,

Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2001 (new ed. 2010)

Katharina Krause and Klaus Niehr, eds, Kunstwerk-Abbild-Buch. Das

illustrierte Kunstbuch von 1730-1939 (work of art, represenattion, book. The

illustrated art book), Munich, Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2007

Ulrich Pfisterer, ed., Klassiker der Kunstgschichte. Vol. 1, Von Winckelmann bis

Warburg, Munich: Beck 2007

Regine Prange, Die Geburt der Kunstgeschichte. Philosophische Ästhetik und

empirische Wissenschaft, (The birth of art history. Philosophical aesthetics and

empirical science), Cologne: Deubner, 2004

Johannes Rößler, Poetik der Kunstgeschichte. Anton Springer, Carl Justi und die

ästhetische Konzeption der deutschen Kunstwissenschaft (poetics of art history,

Anton Springer, Carl Justi an the aesthetic conception of German science of

art), Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2009

Andrea Schütte, Stilräume. Jacob Burckhardt und die ästhetische Anordnung im

19. Jahhrhundert (Spaces for Style, Jacob Burckhardt and the Dispositions of

the Aesthetic in the 19th Century), Bielefeld: Aisthesis 2004

Christine Tauber, Jacob Burckhardts ‚Cicerone‘. Eine Aufgabe zu Genießen (a task

to enjoy), Tubingen: Niemeyer, 2000

Introduction

In the last dozen or so years German-speaking art history has built up a substantial

body of work dealing with itself, with its own history. The investigations range

widely from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, but a great many of them

concentrate on the decades which are held to mark the introduction of the history of

art as a ‘proper’ Wissenschaft - a fully recognised academic study - during the

decades 1820-1880. The exact choice of words, ‘Kunstgeschichte’, ‘Kunstwissenschaft’,

or ‘die universitäre Kunstgeschichtsschreibung’, ‘academic art historiography’, is

therefore, of little significance. Their use is almost synonymous in most works on

the subject.

As a result of their comprehensiveness, it was felt that the works by Hubert

Locher, Regine Prange and Johannes Rößler should take pride of place. Together -

that is, taken one by one - they make up Part I of the report. The other authors are


3

principally dealt with in Part II, which acts as a kind summary, being divided into

issues. For the sake of overall clarity, however, and in order to provide a temporal

continuity, some of the work by the other authors, notably that of Gabriele

Bickendorf, Henrik Karge and Andrea Schütte, is mentioned in Part I as well. A

somewhat awkward result of these divisions is that the thoughts about the major

protagonists, such as Karl Schnaase or Anton Springer, occur several times, within

each of the accounts of the major books.

The chief purpose here is to try to provide a summary; hence this article is

being called a report, rather than a review. The more modest-sounding term has

also been chosen out of respect for the wealth of thought these new writings

contain; for their interdisciplinary breadth and philosophical depth. A significant

limitation of this report is that it only occasionally mentions the Vienna School of

Art History, reflecting a kind of tacit separation between the art histories of Austria

and Germany.

Once again, the issue at stake is the ‘founding of the discipline’, that is, the

origin and contents of art history as a self-contained subject of the highest academic

rank. The concepts established during the nineteenth century have been the

accepted wisdom for all Western art historians trained until at least the 1980s. It is

important to note that this awareness of innovation - one must call it a historical

awareness - was present from the very beginning; it drove the efforts of the chief

protagonists themselves, of Carl Freiherr von Rumohr, Franz Kugler, Schnaase,

Springer, Carl Justi, of Rudolf Eitelberger and Moriz Thausing in Austria, and of

Jacob Burckhardt in Switzerland. The last mentioned remained a household name

during the whole of the twentieth century, while the others continued to be cited

with respect. It must furthermore be stressed that the main concern here is for the

generation that preceded the best known names in late nineteenth and early

twentieth century art history, such as Heinrich Wölfflin, Alois Riegl and Aby

Warburg. Their best known contributions are their methodological innovations;

however in a broader sense their academic pursuits rested firmly on the

achievements and innovations of the previous mid-century generation. It is the

latter who are here considered the founders, those who established a separate

academic framework for art history of the kind that had not existed before. The

training for Warburg, Wölfflin, Riegl and all of their colleagues was in art history, or

principally so. For the previous generation no such thing was available.

To begin with we must note two factors which are so general that one rarely

reflects on them as such: Germanicity, institutionalisation, and the actual nature of

the text, the style of writing. Firstly, it appears that only Gabriele Bickendorf - who

had previously worked extensively on Italian art history writing of the seventeenth

and eighteenth centuries - points to the astounding phenomenon that: ‘since 1820 art

history became Germanised’, though Locher’s book must be noted for its inclusion

of much non-Germanic matter.2 In no way does this mean that German art

historians centred their work on German-speaking countries – the question of a

national German art was then a subsidiary issue and will be mentioned in Part II.

Germanisation here means that any Western art, such as Italian art, was discussed

2 ‘Seit 1820 wurde die Kunstgeschichte germanisiert’, Gabriele Bickendorf, Die Historisierung der

italienischen Kunstbetrachtung im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert, Berlin: Mann, 1989, 12.


4

by Germans with Germans. Secondly, it would seem impossible to discuss the

origin and development of a Wissenschaft without paying attention to its

institutional framework. Some decades ago Heinrich Dilly devoted a pioneering

study exclusively to this issue. The 1850s-1870s were indeed the period in which the

universities of the German-speaking lands instituted the first chairs in the subject,

long before such as thing could be found in almost any other country.3 However, in

the newer investigations dealt with here, the structures of institutionalisation

receive much less attention. Arguably, for many of the earlier protagonists, such as

Rumohr, Kugler or Schnaase, their actual job (if they had one), was not yet a

significant factor as regards their intellectual development. In the case of Springer,

Justi and Burckhardt, their new positions in the universities are here taken for

granted.

The studies dealt with in this report concentrate on the written works, but

not simply by paraphrasing what they contain and by putting those summaries

together to form a string of ideas, as one finds it in the older histories of art history

(Kultermann etc.), but by probing more deeply into their underlying thought

processes. Firstly, in terms of a diversity of academic and mundane contexts

(Locher). Secondly, in terms of the ‘professional’ philosophy of the day (Prange).

Thirdly, and lastly, a more recent, and not yet taken for granted approach

foregrounds not only the intellectual contexts but also deals with the history of the

actual style of writing and of the literary genres with which the art historical books

are linked, such as biography (Rößler). What then arises from the contributions of

Prange and Rößler, and to a slightly lesser extent from Locher is, in the end rather

surprising: the stress on an exact Wissenschaft cannot be maintained any more in any

straightforward, factual sense, or, to use philosophical terms, as a positivistic, or

empiricist one. On the contrary, the new art history appears deeply tied in with

metaphysics and with literary conventions, however much its protagonists, such as

Kugler, Burckhardt or Springer, tried to emphasise the strictly empiricist line. This

also means that all claims of self-sufficiency and ‘purity’, of the subject’s complete

individuality as regards methods need to be challenged. The new art history was

deeply enmeshed with many other academic fields. Part II will return to these very

basic issues.

The early ‘Berliner Schule’

There is here a double beginning: by long-standing consent, the ‘new art history’

started in Berlin and it so happens that this Berlin circle formed the subject of a

major early instance of a new kind of critical examination in the work of Gabriele

Bickendorf.4 Most useful is her summary in Ulrich Pfisterer’s first volume of

Klassiker. The crucial early writings are those by Gustav Friedrich Waagen and Carl

Freiherr von Rumohr. Waagen’s dissertation of 1822 on the van Eyck brothers first

3 Heinrich Dilly, Kunstgeschichte als Institution. Studien zur Geschichte einer Disziplin, Frankfurt:

Suhrkamp, 1979. 4 It began with Gabriele Bickendorf, Der Begin der Kunstgeschichtsschreibung unter dem Paradigma

‘Geschichte’, Worms: Wernersche, 1985. For Rumohr cf. Alexander Bastek and Aschatz von Müller,

eds., Kunst, Küche und Kalkül. Carl Friedrich von Rumohr und die Entdeckung der Kulturgeschichte. (Kat.

Exh. Behnhaus Lübeck 2010), Petersberg: Imhof, 2010.


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of all owes something to the new enthusiasm for the Northern European schools of

painting generated by the Schlegels and the Boisserée brothers with their collection.

Waagen leads the attention away from the long-standing legends of the van Eycks

as inventors of oil painting. Instead he sets, in Bickendorf’s words, their ‘oeuvre into

a […] greater context of European art history’ as well as stressing the artists’

‘Naturalismus and the narrative qualities linked to that’.5 Rumohr’s great

contribution, in his long study of Italian painting from the Byzantine mode up to

Raphael (1827-1831), lay in the way he dispensed with the Vasarian teleology of the

victorious Renaissance and replaced it with a view of ‘a continuous succession of

formal changes’, based on changes – here Bickendorf quotes Rumohr himself, in the

artists’ ‘“künsterischerischen Wollen”’, the ‘artistic volition’.6

The key characterisation of Waagen’s and Rumohr’s procedure was

‘historisch’; theirs was the ‘historical method’. This entailed a more critical use of all

kinds of sources and a new kind of objectivity, a stress on the avoidance of

normative judgments; for the new species of the Medievalist this principally meant

the rejection of the Classical norms of art. In this respect the new art history aligned

itself with the new Berlin ‘critical history’ (the ‘Berliner Historische Schule’) of

Leopold von Ranke and the new ‘exact’ philology of Georg Berthold Niebuhr.7

Waagen subsequently considerably broadened his scope. In fact, through his travels

he became the foremost authority on old master painting in the whole of Europe.

The major innovator in Berlin from the late 1830s into the 1850s was Franz

Kugler. Here the rejection of art philosophy was stronger and the emphasis on

historical accuracy took on models from the natural sciences, that is, mainly from

the way biologists could order enormous masses of factual evidence. Kugler applied

this to his vast surveys of the art of all periods and all nations on earth, establishing

the genre of the universal art historical handbook.8 It must be stressed that while

Kugler’s and most subsequent handbooks which were classified as art history,

included Classical Antiquity, this subject had in fact just been split off from art

history. German classical archaeologists henceforth practiced their own kind of art

history.9

The next major figure who has been counted into the Berlin group was Carl

Schnaase, although he never occupied an academic position and only settled in the

city in 1848. Schnaase’s first book, Niederländische Briefe of 1834 - recently

republished with an incisive introduction by Henrik Karge - presented a highly

5 ‘Das oeuvre […] im grossen Kontext der europäischen Kunstgeschichte’; ‘Naturalismus und die

damit verbundenen erzählerischen Qualitäten’, Bickendorf in Pfisterer, 49, 50. 6 Bickendorf in Pfisterer, 50. 7 Gabriele Bickendorf, ‘Visualität und Narrativität: Rumohrs Italienische Forschungen in einem

methodischen Spannungsfeld’ , in: Geschichte und Asthetik. Festschrift für Werner Busch zum 60.

Geburtstag, Thomas Kirchner and Hubertus Kohle, eds, Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2005, 362-375. 8 Franz Theodor Kugler. Deutscher Kunsthistoriker und Berliner Dichter, Michel Espagne & oth. eds, Berlin:

Akademie Verlag, 2010. 9 See also Marc Schalenberg, ‘“Berliner Schule”’: Kontexte und Konstituierung der Kunstgeschichte ca.

1820-1860’, in: Die Etablierung und Entwicklung der Kunstgeschichte in Deutschland, Polen und Mitteleuropa

(also a Polish title), Wojciech Bałus and Joanna Wolańska, eds., Warsaw: Instytut Sztuki PAN 2010, 105

– 116; cf. Eric Garberson, ‘Art History in The University II: Toelken - Hotho – Kugler, Journal of Art

Historiography, no 5, Dec. 2011; Eric Garberson, ‘Art History in The University: Ernst Guhl’, Journal of

Art Historiography , no 7 , Dec. 2012.


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idiosyncratic mixture of trenchant analyses of artefacts, art-philosophical and

general art historical reflections. With his eight volume work, Geschichte der bildenden

Künste (1843-1879), Schnaase shared with Kugler the ambition to deal with all

peoples and all periods, though his work was never completed, breaking off at the

end of the Middle Ages. But Schnaase aimed ‘higher’ than Kugler. The discussion of

art should rest on the fundamentals of a comprehensive history of politics and all

cultural manifestations and Schnaase devoted long chapters purely to these matters,

before he came to the discussion of monuments. All this was framed with incisive

comments on the historian’s general procedure which earned Schnaase such an

important place in Michael Podro’s sequence of the ‘critical historians’ of art.10 More

recently Henrik Karge has undertaken extensive analyses of Schnaase’s work.

Significantly, Karge sees a lack of connection between Schnaase’s Kulturgechichte

and his Kunstgschichte. But he also stresses the new sophistication Schnaase showed

in the discussion of the actual works, for instance in the case of the co-presence of

late Romanesque and Early Gothic styles of architecture, which far surpasses the

usual stylistic pigeon-holing and simple succession of styles of other contemporary

handbooks.11 Here one should point to the way in which all chapters in Schnaase are

peppered with remarks on diverse specific ‘Volkscharakter’, sets of immensely strong

stereotypes which according to him do have a direct influence on art, at least as

regards the presence or absences of genres; for instance in the case the Poles, whose

nobility, according to Schnaase, still essentially live on their horses and are therefore

unable to excel in the field of architecture.12 The Berlin art historians’ work will be

discussed again in the section on Prange.

Is the term ‘School’ in ‘Berliner Schule der Kunstgeschichte’ justified?

Hardly, if we take it in its narrowest sense, as with the Wiener Schule der

Kunsgeschichte, in the sense of the subject’s self-contained existence, serving

research and teaching in academe. Although there was some teaching of art history

at the new Berlin University, the situation in this respect from the 1820s-1870s

remained very unclear. The first ‘ordentliche’ professor, Herman Grimm – to be

mentioned again much later on – was only installed in 1873. The key institution in

Berlin was the new museum, of which Waagen became the first director (of the

collection of paintings). This new environment guaranteed a high degree of

connoisseurial exactitude and a high academic probity. A basic notion of state

support and state recognition for ‘Bildung’, for the furtherance of cultural education

also characterised all efforts in Berlin in those decades and the museum to be a place

for the education of the broader public; Kugler likewise saw his task as such a

double one. In more strictly methodological terms, Bickendorf does not want to

come out with any sharp conclusion either for the Berlin ‘school’. Hegel’s influence

whose lectures on aesthetics in the 1820s could be considered a quasi universal art

history, she considers negligible. Rather, she stresses the impact of Herder’s theory

10 Michael Podro, The Critical Historians of Art, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1983. 11 Karge most recently: ‘Stilgeschichte versus Kulturgeschichte: Zur Entfaltung der kunsthistorischen

Methodik in den Jahrzehnten ab 1830’, in: Die Etablierung und Entwicklung der Kunstgeschichte in

Deutschland, Polen und Mitteleuropa (also a Polish title), Wojciech Bałus and Joanna Wolańska, eds.,

Warsaw: Instytut Sztuki PAN, 2010, 52-59. 12 Carl Schnaase, Geschichte der bildenden Künste, vol. 7 (that is, Geschichte der bildenden Künste im

Mittelalter, vol. 5), Düsseldorf: Julius Budeus, 1876, 526 (already in the 1st edition, vol. 5, 1864, 659-61).


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of the ‘Volkscharakter’, evident from the early work of Waagen onwards.13 The more

strictly philosophical angle taken by Prange will reveal further trends for Berlin.

A multitude of continuities and innovations (Locher)

Hubert Locher’s is the longest and the most wide-ranging of the three major works

dealt with here. It covers aspects of art history from the eighteenth to the twentieth

century, but much of it is devoted to the crucial period dealt with in this report.

In Locher’s at first somewhat puzzling title: ‘The History of Art as a

historical Theory of Art’ the key word has to be ‘theory’. However, the book does

not come across as a work of theory, ordered by one stringent formula; instead it is a

discursive work in which theories are constantly mixed with more mundane

matters and contexts of many kinds. A better idea of the book’s slant is given by the

title of the introductory section: ‘Kunstgeschichte als Wissenschaft der Kunst’, art

history as the science / academic study of art. Here Locher addresses the central

issue of the years 1820-1880, already indicated in this report, the attempts to

establish the study of the history of art as a bona-fide Wissenschaft, based on the

principle of verifiability. In a key section, Locher homes in on the problems of

evaluation. He refers to two programmatic articles by Moriz Thausing and Anton

Springer of the 1870s and 1880s in which these two principal members of the brand-

new profession argue for the radical separation of art history from art criticism as

well as from any kind of involvements with the artists of the day, because their

judgments are always subjective and could never fit in with the art historians’ anti-

normativity. Locher cites Thausing’s often repeated contention ‘I can think of the

best art history in which the word beautiful does not occur at all.’ Locher, however,

also stresses at this point that art historians do habitually make judgements of art

value, when sifting through what is or was important, or what was innovative, or

just to determine ‘authenticity’. On these occasions, Locher contends, a critical

discussion of the notion of ‘art’ does not occur; rather the term is taken for granted.

There is a continuing notion of a timeless ‘contents’ of art, comprising the present,

as well.14 What has also never really been clarified, in respect of value judgments, is

the art historian’s frequent uneasiness vis-à-vis contemporary art. At this point

members of the profession contend that their judgements about past art are

legitimised by the historical distance. Yet Locher holds that ‘the commonplace of a

historical distance being the precondition for an objective judgment in actual fact

only serves as an excuse to shirk from providing a reason for making a judgment.’15

13 Bickendorf in Pfisterer, 53. 14 `Weiterhin geht man von einem überzeitlichen Inhalt der Kunst aus’. Cf. Anton Springer,

‘Kunstkenner und Kunsthistoriker’, Im Neuen Reich, vol. 11, no. 46 1881, 737-758, also in Anton

Springer, Bilder aus der neueren Kunstgeschichte, 2nd ed. Bonn: A.Marcus 1886, 377-404. ‘Ich kann mir die

beste Kunstgeschichte denken, in der das Wort schön gar nicht vorkommt’; Moritz Thausing, ‘Die

Stellung der Kunstgeschichte als Wissenschaft’. …Antrittsvorlesung (inaugural lecture) …’ 1873, also

in Moritz Thausing, Wiener Kunstbriefe, Leipzig: Seemann 1884 1-20 (article newly published in Wiener

Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte, XXXVI, 1983, 140-150), See also translation and comemntary by Karl Johns,

Journal of Art Historigraphy, 1 2009. Locher, 52-55. 15 ‘Der Gemeinplatz einer notwendigen historischen Distanz als Vorraussetzung für ein objektives

Urteil is allerdings nur eine Ausrede, um sich von der Begründing einer Wertung zu drücken’. Locher,

55.


8

What Locher is principally aiming to say in his long section on das Kunsturteil, on

value judgements in art, is that the new Verwissenschaflichung, the new

scientification of German-language art history around 1870 ‘cannot really be

interpreted as a gain in objectivity’.16 This is somewhat reminiscent of a recent

British investigation in the continuing use of ekphrasis in art history by Jaś Elsner.17

In a wide-ranging section Locher then deals with early to mid twentieth

century art historians who did reflect on the relationship of the art of their own time

- largely meaning modernist art - to the art of the past.18 A great number of journals

throughout the century addressed both contemporary and ancient art. Although not

all would share the simple view of an early editorial in the Burlington Magazine,

stating that ‘the study of ancient art has a practical end, namely the improvement of

modern art, and is, in our opinion, the only means by which this end can be

achieved’.19 Locher finally states that, just like art, art history can also have the

function of positing a harmonious world: ‘Kunstwissenschaft finally may, just as art

[itself] be conceived as and conducted as a harmonised world which is opposed to

disharmonious reality’.20

The other three quarters of the book excel in their diversity. Well into the

first section, and quite en passant, Locher declares the fundamentals of his own

procedure. ‘In the way in which several historical problems [Problemgeschichten] are

laid out, one can avoid a new “grand narrative”’.21 A series of ‘small narratives’ are

better suited to tie the factors of art history into their varied contexts.

One of the great strengths of the book is the way it spans both the spheres of

high academe and high theory as well as mundane factors down to the ‘popular’

end of the discipline and that both aspects are suitably interwoven, both in Central

and in Western Europe. Whether an overall narrative can be entirely avoided may

be disputable; in any case, Locher’s very broadly chronological procedure does help

with the comprehension of the whole.

The first complex is on the search for the national identity factor and the way

national identifications appeared as an essential grounding for the new

Kunstgeschichte. In this most wide-ranging section Locher goes back as far as the

seventeenth century, to Claude Perrault, then moves on to Voltaire and

Montesquieu and the emergence of the ‘recognition of different national ways of

designing’.22 Winckelmann is introduced with: ‘A people’s “way of thinking”

became visible’.23 Soon after that the new Medievalism greatly strengthened the

national concept, whether with Alexandre Lenoir, the Boisserée brothers or Walter

Scott, or in Neo-Gothic architecture and Nazarene painting. Locher then widens the

frame and considers manners of travelling, with the various grand tours now in the

16 ‘Kann daher nicht eigentlich als Objetivitätsgewinn interpretiert werden.’ Locher, 54. 17 Jaś Elsner, ‘Art History and Ekphrasis’, Art History, vol. 33 no 1, Feb. 2010, 11-26. 18 Josef Strzygowski, Hanz Tietze and others, Locher 55 ff. 19 ‘Editorial Article’, The Burlington Magazine, 1 1903, 148. 20 ‘Kunstwissenschaft schliesslich kann ebenso wie Kunst als harmonisierte Gegenwelt zur

disharmonischen Realität konzipiert and betrieben werden.’ Locher, 95. 21 ‘Indem mehrere Problemgeschichten dargelegt werden, soll eine neue “grosse Erzählung”

vermieden werden’. Locher, 25. 22 ‘Anerkennung unterschiedlicher nationaler Gestaltunsgweisen’. Locher, 107. 23 ‘Die sichtbare gewordene “Art zu Denken” eines Voikes’, Locher, 109.


9

service of sampling the diversity of cultures, for instance when Germans travelled to

Britain. Vital - and here Locher reaches the Berlin art historians - was ‘one’s own

ocular observation’.24 He ends, suitably, bearing in mind what was said at the

beginning about absolute value judgments, by stressing that ‘to supply the proof

that the homeland originated a valid / genuine art is a principal aim of romantic art

history’25 - a wording which also covers much of early twentieth century

Kunstgeographie.

The next section is entitled ‘The Art of the World – in Books’,26 which must

be taken literally, dealing with the various types of publications and sketching out

their varied messages as related to those types and formats. It begins with the new

trends to create comprehensiveness, coupled with the crusade for accuracy, with or

without illustrations. The issue of pictorial works in art history will be touched on in

the second part of this report. A continuing question was whether to choose a

division according to time or to types of art. Kugler made the beginning with his

Handbücher; the high point then came with the ‘philosophisch-epische’ type of treatise,

the work of Schnaase and Springer, followed by the more factual kinds of texts.

From the 1850s Wilhelm Lübke took over the genre from Kugler, achieving

enormous success especially with his Grundriss der Kunstgeschichte of 1860 spurring

half a dozen translations and going through many editions, each time suitably

‘updated’.27

However, already by the 1870s, striving towards comprehensiveness was

being devalued; proper academic work was predominantly concerned with

investigating the particular. Locher’s section ends with the way in which such

handbooks turn into travel guides, serving as ‘introductions to aesthetic

judgments’.28 One remembers Jacob Burckhardt’s Der Cicerone: eine Anleitung zum

Genuss der Kunstwerke in Italien, of 1855, which translates something like ‘Directions

for receiving [delicious] pleasure from the works of art in Italy’. One just wonders

whether Thausing’s convictions (art historians do not need the word beauty) were

strong enough to resist. Earlier on, Christine Tauber, in her Jacob Burckhardts

Cicerone. Eine Aufgabe zum Genießen, provided careful analyses of the ways in which

Burckhardt arrived at his descriptions and evaluations. A key discussion deals with

Burckhardt’s concerns with subjectivity and the assessment, in each case, of the

artist’s free intentionality vis-à-vis the pressures exercised upon him by the

commission. We shall return to Burckhardt in the section on Prange.

Locher’s third section is devoted to the term which became fore grounded

more and more in the later nineteenth century: ‘form’. He first takes the term at its

most literal, discussing the beginnings of abstract-formal décor in the applied arts

from about 1800 onwards in Paris and Berlin, proceeding to the incisive theories of

decoration of the mid-century and from there to Semper, Hildebrand and Wölfflin,

24 ‘Der eigene Augenschein’, Locher, 192. 25 ‘Den Beweis anzutreten, dass in der Heimat echte Kunst entstanden ist, ist ein Hauptziel der

romantischen Kunstgeschichte’, Locher, 199. 26 ‘Die Kunst der Welt – im Buch’ 202 ff.. 27 Cf. earlier Dan Karlholm, Handbokernas konsthisoria. Om skapander allmän konsthistoria I Tyskland under

1800 talet, Stockholm: Brutus Őstling, 1996; Dan Karlholm, The Representation of Art History in

Nineteenth Century Germany and Beyond, Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2004. 28 ‘Anleitung zum ästhetischen Urteil’, Locher, 254 ff..


10

ending with Kandinsky’s and Hölzel’s theories of abstract form. Locher’s last

chapter rounds it all off with the title ‘At the end of the “Grand Narrative”’.29 First of

all, under the heading ‘die Einheit der Kunst’, ‘the unity of art’, he picks up the

discussions at the beginning, postulating that the new late nineteenth century

formalist understanding of style was also helping with Modernism’s self-

understanding. At the same time the older way of understanding ‘style’, namely as

a tool for geographical classification, was, by the early twentieth century,

developing into a new instrument which helped to classify and emphasise ‘Volk’ and

‘Rasse’ as ‘kollektive Subjekte der Stilgeschichte’.30 The real end of the “grand narrative”

is finally marked by the turn towards ‘interpretation’, by which Locher principally

means iconology.

The metaphysical underpinning (Prange)

As reported, the belief in a ‘historical distance’ which renders the art historian’s

evaluations of the art of the past ‘objective’, was, according to Locher, a fallacy,

used in order to escape from supplying a proper grounding for any kinds of

judgements. He concludes: ‘This grounding can only be a metaphysical one, if the

timeless concept is maintained’.31 It was Locher’s principal message that normativity

did not get phased out in the new art history of the middle of the nineteenth

century, nor, for that matter, any time later, in spite of all the statements postulating

the arrival of an exact, objective Kunstwissenchaft. The explanation of metaphysics

and of the postulates of the timelessness of art is the exact topic of Regine Prange’s

book. The placing of ‘empirical’ into the subtitle marks it out as the subsidiary topic.

Prange deals with the sequence of major art historians from Fiorillo to Dvořák, with

due emphasis on the main period of the formulation of the new art history from the

1820s-1880s. With only a slight exaggeration one might call Prange’s a philosophical

work, definitely it is a theoretical one, and a compact, concentrated one at that. One

might also classify it as using the history of ideas approach in which the occasional

socio-political statement plays only a very subordinate role. Titles of such kinds of

books have a demanding task of conveying the essential content; it is a sign of how

much the German art historical fraternity takes for granted what Prange’s title does

not say, and even the blurb hardly says, namely that nineteenth century art history

is an all-German story.

Only a crude summary can be supplied in this report. Prange prefaces the

history of nineteenth century art history with a section of almost equal length on the

philosophy of art since the Renaissance, from Alberti onwards, leading, via Leibniz

and Winckelmann, to the full formulation of a philosophical aesthetics in the work

of Baumgarten and Kant and then of Schelling and Hegel in the early nineteenth

century. ‘Only with the systematic inclusion of the art philosophical traditions it

becomes clear in which fundamental ways art history has continued the idealism of

29 ‘Am Ende der “grossen Erzählung”’ Locher, 419 ff.. 30 Locher, 439 ff . 31 ‘Diese Begründung kann nur metaphyssich sein, wenn der überzeitliche Begriffnicht aufgegeben

wird.’ Locher, 55.


11

the early modern period.’32 From the normative theories of art Prange switches to

the new eighteenth century connoisseurship and antiquarianism which

concentrated the attention on the individual old object and which led to a new kind

of historical evaluation, linking diverse art works to diverse histories and

geographies, and to the emergence of a new kind of devotee to art and history,

somebody who was neither an artist nor a theorist.

The principal contribution of the later eighteenth century was, to put it at its

most basic, a new generalised notion of ‘art’, as an entity and value in itself, which

stood ‘above’ the knowledge of the individual arts (die Künste), above the rules of

their practices, which went beyond their specialised terminologies of judgement and

which heightened the esteem and ekphrasis so far conveyed in the artists’ individual

biographies. Winckelmann’s contribution fitted in precisely into the beginnings of a

new thinking of a ‘pure art’ and coincided with the beginnings of the new aesthetics

of Baumgarten and Kant, the new Wissenschaft des Schoenen which was at the same

time a Wissenschaft of the perception of beauty.33 The new aesthetic ‘emancipated the

sensuous capability to an intellectual capability’.34 It all resulted in the

comprehensive notion of a secularised and autonomous value of art, which

according to enlightenment thinking, was not subjected to ecclesiastical and political

powers but emanated from the individual artist who was now celebrated through

the notion of an agency of complete independence, that of the ‘genius’.

The next sections, on two philosophers of the school of German idealism,

Friedrich Wilhelm Schelling and Georg Wilhelm Hegel, can be seen as the heart of

Prange’s book. Of particular importance was the former who had so far hardly been

mentioned in the histories of art history.35 Around 1800 Schelling was a member of

the Jena circle of early German Romanticism, which, besides Hegel included the

Schlegel brothers and which was also closely placed to the Weimar circle of Johann

Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Schiller. In those years, aesthetics rose to

become the dominant theme in Schelling’s thinking. At some point he even tended

towards a radical aestheticism when he valued the aesthetic intuition over and

above the philosopher’s discursive reasoning. Schelling expanded the cognitive and

judgmental issues presented in Kant into the sphere of production, thus returning to

elements of the older philosophies of art. Schelling always viewed aesthetics as both

a specialised field of inquiry and as a comprehensive and culturally accessible form

of philosophical meta-theory36.

32 ‘Nur durch die systematische Einbeziehung der kunstphilosophischen Traditionen wird jedoch

deutlich, in welch prinzipieller Weise die Kunstgeschichte den Idealismus [...] der Vormoderne […]

fortgesetzt hat’, Prange, 12. 33 Prange, 36. 34 ‘Emanzipiert[e] die Ästhetik das Sinnliche zu einem intellektuellen Vermögen’, Prange, 93. 35 Only marginally in Udo Kultermann, Geschichte der Kunstgeschichte, Vienna: Econ 1966 and in Locher,

very briefly in Georg Kauffmann, Die Entwicklung der Kunstgeschichte im 19. Jahrhundert, Vortrag …,

publ. by G.Henkel Stiftung, Dusseldorf: Westdeutscher Verlag 1992, 12, and not at all in Michael

Podro, The Critical Historians of Art, New Haven and London: Yale University Press 1983. Prange’s

references to Schelling’s philosophy of art are from his: `Über das Verhältnis der bildenden Künste zu

der Natur’, 1807, in Schelling’s sämmliche Werke, Ausgburg: Cotta, 1856-1861, and from Philosophie der

Kunst (1802/30) in: Werke 1/5. 36 Prange, 59-64. ‚


12

Under the impact of Wackenroder’s Herzensergiessungen eines kunstliebenden

Klosterbruders (‘outpourings from the heart of an art-loving monk’),37 Schelling

departed from the enlightenment’s aesthetic utopia of complete freedom and

rationality and began to see artistic creativity as well as the appreciation of art as

species of deep religious devotion, of the state of ‘being deeply touched’. It was

through this way of appreciating art that the sense of loss of the mythical past could

be bridged. 38

The new religious absolutism of art formed part of Schelling’s great

comprehensive philosophical system, his Identitätsphilosophie.39 Here, Schelling

aimed to establish a new metaphysics of absolute harmony which overcomes all

contingencies and all dichotomies and conflicts, of freedom vs. necessity, of the

conscious and the unconscious, and above all it bridges the gap between nature and

spirit [Geist] or culture. It meant a return to the ‘absolute free spirit’, cancelling out

the fall from grace, caused by reflection.40 The artist-genius finds his or her place by

paralleling nature’s creativity, creating, like nature, unconsciously. Works of art are

to be understood according to the laws of the eternal works of nature.41 In short, art,

in all its genres, mirrors the absolute according to the identity system … in which

‘everything is united’.42 Within the absolute universe, art, like philosophy, belongs

to the ideal world.43 This must also be understood ‘as the unity of all works of art as

the revelation of the divine’.44 ‘Kunst als Offenbarung’. Art makes the absolute real.

‘Art as revelation’, is Prange’s heading for this chapter. Most importantly, Prange

stresses here the way in which Schelling restores ‘the old metaphysical idea of

artistic creation’.45

Furthermore, within the new philosophical aesthetics what applies to the

creation of art also applies to its appreciation. One has to get away from all shallow

connoisseurship. Quoting Schelling himself on this function of the new philosophy

of art: at a time ‘when such an age of happiness and of pure production has passed,

at that point reflection enters and with it a general alienation / disunity

[Entzweiung]. […] Only philosophy can […] open up again the primary sources

[Urquellen] for the reflection which for production had largely dried up.’46 An

‘enthusiastic researcher [begeisterter Forscher]’ is needed. Schelling, according to

37 Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder, Herzensergiessungen eines kunstliebenden Klostebruders, first publ.

1797 (co-author Ludwig Tieck), in: Wackenroder: Werke und Briefe, Gerda Heinrich, ed., Berlin: Union

1984. 38 ‘Rührung und tiefe Ehrfurcht’, Prange, 60. 39 ‘Religiöse [...] Zielsetzung’, Prange, 60. 40 ‘Absolut freien Geistes’, Prange, 61. 41 Prange, 65. 42 ‘Kunst in allen ihren Gattungen wird als Spiegelbild des Absoluten im Sinne des Identitätsystems

dargetsellt’, Prange, 63. 43 ‘Innerhalb des absoluten Universums gehört die Kunst wie die Philosophie der idealen Welt an’,

Prange, 64. 44 ‘Kunst [ist die] Einheit aller Kunstwerke. Offenbarung des Göttlichen’, Prange, 64. 45 Prange, 65. 46 ‘Wenn ein solches Zeitlater des Glücks und der reinen Produktion vorbei ist, so tritt die Reflexion

und mit ihr die allgemeine Entzweiung ein [...] Nur die Philophie kann die für die Produktion

grössenteils versiegten Urquellen der Kunst für die Reflexion wieder öffnen’, quoted after Prange, 64

(Friedrich Wilhem Josef Schelling, Schellings sämmtliche Werke, Stuttgart: Cotta 1856-61, vol. 1 / 5 360

ff.).


13

Prange, makes renewed use here of Baumgarten’s interpretation of Plato’s notion of

enthusiasm.47

With regard to the ideal of nature, a problem lay with the fact that normally

its works are initially characterised by ‘hard forms and impenetrability’.48 They have

therefore to be brought ‘to perfection, transformed to softer and more complex

formations, to beauty’.49 Here Schelling stayed close to Winckelmann’s preferences

and the whole idealist tradition, for whom antique Classical sculpture was

understood as the perfect combination of nature and the idea. But with the new turn

towards Christian mysticism among the Romantics, towards the ‘soul’ as the locus

of religious revelation, the ideal of the ‘sculpturally precise’ could be supplemented

with the ideal of the ‘soulful soft’.50 This also meant a turn from sculpture to

painting as a carrier of the highest qualities in art. As Prange emphasises, Schelling

here adopted a historical perspective, namely that of antiquity followed by the

equally valuable art of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It was Wilhelm

Heinrich Wackenroder who had expanded the classical canon and who had shifted

the emphasis onto the Christian art of Raphael, praising the way the latter balanced

the ‘divine’ with the ‘human’.51 In the same vein one may read in Schelling on

Guido Reni’s Assunta, his favourite painting (now in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich)

where he sees the picture as a kind of personification of art, ‘as if growing upwards

from the depth of nature […] lifts itself with certainty and clearly contoured

[Begrenzung], develops inner infinity and plenitude, finally transfigured to grace,

and at last reaches the soul […]’.52

The years around 1800 saw the foregrounding of another chapter of the

history of art. It had again been initiated by Wackenroder, in the way he introduced

Dürer as the ‘friend’ of Raphael and Michelangelo. At the same time there were

lively discussions as to what forms a specific art for the present in Germany should

take. Schelling now takes a distinct historical and geographical turn, towards the

German fatherland of the sixteenth century. As Prange explains, and it sounds quite

surprising: ‘Schelling’s renewed reading of Winckelmann from the standpoint of his

philosophy of nature actually resulted in a shift of the normative category of ideal

beauty to the idea of the nation’.53 The national idea takes the place of the classical

ideal. ‘Patriotic enthusiasm […] is held to be the Ur- force of a future living art’.54 It

also now leads Schelling to a historicist statement: one may understand the

impossibility of reviving Classical art by realising that ‘different ages take part in a

47 Prange, 65. 48 ‘Harter Form und Verschlossenheit’ (quoting Schelling), Prange, 65. 49 ‘Das Ideal der Vollendung …zu weicheren, komplexen Gestalten, zum Schöenen’, Prange, 65. 50 ‘Plastisch bestimmten zum Seelisch –Weichen’, Prange , 71. 51 ‘Gleichgewicht des Göttlichen und Menschlichen’, Prange, quoting Schelling, Prange, 67. 52 ‘Wie aus der Tiefe der Natur …emporwachend mit Bestimmtheit und Begrenzung anhebt, innnere

Unendlichkeit und Fülle entfaltend, endlich zur Anmut sich verkläert, zuletzt zur Seele gelangt’,

quoted by Prange, Friedrich Wilhem Josef Schelling, Schellings sämmtlcihe Werke, Stuttgart: Cotta 1856-

61, vol. 1 / 5 322ff, Prange, 69. 53 `Schelling’s Relektüre Winckelmanns aus dem Geist seiner romantischen Naturphilosophie

resultierte nämlich in einer Verlagerung der normativen Kategorie des Idealschönen auf die Idee der

Nation’, Prange ,70. 54 ‘Der vaterländische Enthusiasmus …gilt somit als Urkraft einer zukünftigen lebendigen Kunst’,

Prange 71.


14

different enthusiasm.’55 Which in turn leads Prange to state that ‘with Schelling an

appreciation of art became possible which did not have to use the term beauty, and

yet did not have to forego the metaphysical concept of representation [i.e. of

showing forth the absolute]’56 – a fundamental statement indeed in the context of

Thausing’s contention of 1873, cited above, where he maintained that the term

beauty is not needed in art history. In view of the new exakte Wissenschaft to come,

one may see Schelling, according to Prange’s interpretation, as supporting both

mysticism and historicism.

Prange entitles her section on Hegel, as one might expect: ‘The end of fine art

and the beginning of modern art history’.57 She begins by stressing that the former

assertion was shared by his early colleagues, the Romantics, who held that ‘the great

achievements of an ideal art all belonged to a mythical past’.58 However, rather than

giving up hope, like his poet friend Hölderlin, who ended up with a darkened

mind, or, like Schelling, who tried to construct a super-unity of the real and the

ideal, of natural and human creativity, Hegel, Prange argues, ‘placed the

relationality of subject and object, of spirit and nature onto a completely new basis,

namely a dialectical one. He understands them in the movement of contradictions

and not, like Schelling, as a unity of opposites’.59 Thus art cannot be united with

nature’s innocence; Hegel places the Kunstschöne above the incomplete beauty of

nature.60 In her examination of the chapters on art in the Phänomenologie des Geistes

of 1807 Prange stresses that Hegel held all such constructions of ‘unity’ to be empty

formulae.61 Instead, Hegel postulates an ‘awareness/ consciousness of the history of

human culture’.62 Hegel, too, adheres to a notion of the absolute, but it should not to

be understood as a ‘pre-reflexive concept of unity’,63 as with Kant and Schelling, but

in the ‘developmental dynamic of its sequences’.64 For an understanding of art one

needs to consider the agencies of work, human power and the changes man

wrought on nature, and one should leave behind the famous Kantian notion of

disinterested pleasure - interesseloses Wohlgefallen’.65 In Hegel’s system, art is

assigned - in the context of religion, politics and philosophy - its role in the

development of human consciousness, more precisely, in the progression towards

the ultimate aim, self-consciousness; art marks the phase in which its creator, the

human being, becomes conscious of himself or herself through his or her product.66

55 ‘Verschiedenen “Zeitaltern […] eine verschiedene Begeisterung zu Teil“ werde’, Prange quoting

Schelling, Prange ,70. 56 ‘Durch Schelling wurde so eine Betrachtung der Kunst möglich, die ohne den Begriff des Schönen

auskam, aber nicht auf den metphysischen Sinn der Repräsentation verzichten musste’, Prange, 71. 57 `Das Ende der schönen Künste und der Beginn moderner Kunstgeschichte’, Prange, 71. 58 `Die grossen Leistungen der idealen Kunst einer mythischen Vergagenheit angeghören ..., Prange, 71. 59 `Hegel tellte die Verhältnisbestimmung von Subject und Object, Geist und -Natur auf eine ganz

neue, nämlich dialektische Grundlage. Er fasst sie in der Bewegung des Widespruchs und nicht wie

Schelling als Einheit der Gegensätze …,’ Prange, 72. 60 Prange, 79. 61 Prange, 73. 62 ‘Bewusstsein der Geschichte der menschlichen Kultur’, Prange, 73. 63 `Präreflexive Einheistvorstellung’, Prange, 79. 64 `Entwicklungsgeschichtliche Dynamik ihres Aufeinanderfolgens’, Prange, 82. 65 Prange, 79. 66 Prange, 81.


15

Prange then provides much detail of Hegel’s Ästhetik (first published in 1835,

but given as lectures at Berlin University from 1820 to 1829), entitling her section

‘History of the categories of the fine arts and the system of genres’, dealing with the

complex constructions of dialectic progression. (The three categories of art /

Kunstformen being, in historical order, the symbolic, the classic, and the romantic;

the three genres or media /Kunstgattungen (genres) are architecture, sculpture and

painting, in a parallel historical order with the categories).67 Of the greatest

importance is the transition from Classical to Romantic. Once again comes the

praise of the universally appreciated work of Classical Greek sculpture. For

Christian art the dominant art form is now painting. Here religious content

dominates over form.68 Hegel had come to know major medieval works in the

collection of the Boisserée brothers. A stronger opposition was now postulated

between Klassik and Romantik. The latter was characterised above all, in the spirit of

Wackenroder and Schelling, by a strong subjectivity, by the ‘inner feeling /

Innerlichkeit’ of love.69 Here, too, Raphael represented the peak. The last period for

which Hegel had something positive to say was seventeenth century Dutch

painting.

The ideal of art was understood by Hegel both as a norm and as belonging to

a certain historical phase, or step, of the development of mankind. As is well known,

Hegel assigned literature and music a ‘higher’ state in the development of the

human spirit, following on from the visual arts, all of them to be superseded, finally,

by philosophy. However, this did not mean that the fine arts should be devalued as

such. In a crucial passage Prange again traces the steps of Hegel’s system and its

implications:

Art is the first “immediate self-gratification of the absolute spirit”, in the

form of sensuous perception. In this phase art has its highest ranking. This

religion of art is followed by the religion of the spirit, Christianity. The

absolute is being transferred “from the objecthood [Gegenständlichkeit] of

art into the interiority [Innerlichkeit] of the subject”. The medium of truth is

no longer its sensuous perception but its imagination [Vorstellung], so that

art loses its absolute importance. This was already contained in the

Phänomenlogie. The question what was to become to art after the ending of

its highest destination, was answered by Hegel only in his Ästhetik, and in

this introduction of an anti-classical pole of art lay his most influential

innovation. Christian devotion no longer addressed itself to art as such,

Hegel concludes, but to the heartfelt feeling [innig empfundnenen] for

contents which has been called in by the imagination [Vorstellung].

Philosophy finally intensifies the interiorisation [Innerlichkeit] of

knowledge further to a form of free thinking which unites the truth-content

of art and religion on the level of the idea and renders it real / factual

[verwirklicht]. Hegel hereby also identifies the position of a Wissenschaft of

67 ‘Geschichte der Kunstformen und Systematik der Gattungen’, Prange, 86. 68 Prange, 83. 69 ‘Innigkeit der Empfindung’, Hegel, quoted by Prange, 92.


16

art which is possible only when a point beyond sensuous perception and

subjective imagination [Vorstellung] has been reached.70

It is important to note here that, as with Schelling, it was the break with of

the absolute authority of Classical art and the placing of another major conception of

art alongside it, namely (Christian) religious art, which also instituted a new kind of

intellectually independent Wissenschaft of art. Whatever was to happen to art itself,

the philosophers postulated a new valid concern for it, the possibility of valid

scientific research, both as regards continuing investigations into aesthetic theory

and as regards art’s history. Art history became a separate subject, although - and

that is Prange’s principal thesis - not as separate as most art historians would

maintain. In the immediate aftermath of this step, however, the perceptions of the

two philosophers diverged. While Schelling showed some belief in there being at

least the promise of a new national art, Hegel’s position vis-à-vis the art of his time

seemed to lack such a consideration. Hegel applied vague criticisms, such as

maintaining that genre painting of his own time, compared with seventeenth

century Dutch painting, was lacking depth; and he chose not to take note of other

producers at all.71 Should one search here for the beginning of what Locher calls the

futile notion of a ‘historical distance’?

Prange’s summary of the philosophical part of her book is given here in full:

The concept of an autonomous art which today has again become a subject

of discussion originated in the eighteenth century. It resulted from a new

science of perception and of the beautiful which Baumgarten introduced as

a new discipline of philosophy and which he called “Ästhetik”. While the

sciences of Classical Antiquity and of the Early Modern period had always

given unequivocal priority to rational experience / cognition [Erkenntnis]

and knowledge [Wissen], aesthetics emancipated sensuous capabilities to

an intellectual capability, whose function was also to lead to human

betterment. Aesthetic experience thus began to take the place of religion,

art and Bildung [upbringing in the sense of acquiring cultural knowledge]

were elevated to exemplary cultural bourgeois values. Essentially these

70 Kunst ist die erste „unmittelbare Selbstbefriedigung des absolute Geistes“ in der Form der

sinnlichen Anschauung. Hier hat sie ihren höchsten Stellenwert. Auf die Religion der Kunst

folgt die Religion des Geistes, das Christentum. Das Absolute witd „aus der

Gegenständlichkeit der Kunst auf die Innerlichkeit des Subjekts“ verlagert. Nicht mehr die

sinnliche Anschauung, sondern die Vortsellung ist Medium der Wahrheit, so dass die Kunst

ihre absolute Bedeutung verliert. Das war schon in der Phänomenologie ausgeführt worden.

Auf die Frage, was aus der Kunst nach dem Ende ihrer höchsten Bestimmung wird,

antwortet Hegel erst in seiner Ästhetik, und in dieser Einführung eines antiklassischen Pols

der Kunst liegt seine wirksamste Neuerung. Nicht mehr der Kunst selbst gilt die christliche

Andacht, folgert Hegel, sondern dem von der Vorstellung aufgerufenen ind innig

empfundenen religiösen Inhalt. Die Philophie schliesslich steigert diese Innerlcihkeit des

Wissens noch weiter zur Form des freien Denkens, das die Wahrheit der Kunst auf der

Eebeneder Idee vereinigt und versachlicht. Damit benennt Hegel auch die Position einer

Wissenschaft der Kunst, die erst jenseits der sinnlichen Anschauung und der subjektiven

Vorstellung möglich wird.

Prange , 82-83. 71 Prange, 77, 83, 93.


17

were established by Kant with his theory of the judgment of taste and his

concept of the genius. The autonomy of the “schönen Kunste” [fine art(s)] is

the outcome of his Critique of Judgement. Schelling’ and Hegel’s

comprehensive idealist philosophies of art gave art a high value as a form

of knowledge [Erkenntnis] and related their historical and genre-specific

differentiation [gattungsmässige Differenzierung] to the constitution of

culture and its progress. Against the background of the decline of the old

metaphysics, where art was losing its living function in religious cults,

these two philosophers opened up two avenues into the modern discussion

of art, at opposites to each other, which until this day mark its decisive

impulses. The alternative is, to put it briefly, “nature” or “history”.

Schelling’s philosophy of art continues the moralism of Kant’s concept

[Ansatz] in an intensified religious sense. The artist-genius proceeds /

works like nature, he restores in his products the original unity of subject

and object and renders in his works the absolute perceptible [anschaulich].

The work of art is thus an apparition / anticipation [Vorschein] of a better

reality, in which the old unity of subject and object would be restored.

Hegel, by contrast, says goodbye to the idea that the mythical age could be

restored through art. His system of the past [Vergangenheitslehre]

historicises art. Art is, according to his philosophy of history, only one

phase in the (development of) the human spirit and is to be superseded by

the higher-level philosophical understanding [Begriff]. Art history thus

follows after the metaphysically determined “autonomous” art had ended;

the consistently developed historical interpretation of art and its genres

constitutes the basis of the development of the subject which was now

starting. And yet, it is rather Schellings “construction of a universe for art”

that has an effect of the self-assurance / self confidence [Selbstbewusstsein]

of art history, which in the spirit of Romanticism resisted Hegel’s verdict of

the end of art.72

A search for these two principal names in the rest of the book would have provided

a good initial orientation, but unfortunately the book suffers from that regrettably

frequent German habit of not supplying an index. Hegel and Schelling probably

come neck and neck, but the winner is clearly the latter.

In the following 120 pages Prange sets out in her clear and concise way, in

chronological succession, the course of German-language art history over the next

one hundred years, contributing substantial insights to the incredibly varied work

of each of the writers. The angle of her evaluation remains consistent throughout; as

in the section is entitled, ‘the theoretical Foundation of Art History as a scientific

Discipline’73 which Prange introduces as follows:

The subject of art history established itself, as in the case of literature and

musicology through the institutional and methodological splitting away

from philosophical aesthetics. Deliberations about beauty and the ideal are

72 Prange 93-94. German version in Appendix. 73 Prange, 95.


18

being replaced by an analysis of artistic artefacts which saw itself as strictly

[streng] historical, based on connoisseurial and source-critical methods.

However, the notion of art [Kunstbegriff] of philosophical aesthetics was

linked to these empirical procedures. Without this Kunstbegriff and its

normative implications art history as a wissenschaftliche discipline could not

have constituted itself. 74

The last sentence may be taken as the lynchpin of the whole book. One must see it as

a result on the massive stress of the first component, the Kunstbegriff, that the second

component, scientificness, both with regards to the source-critical methods and the

connoisseurship, which together are headed under empiricism, receives much less

attention.

Key terms at the outset are historicism [Historismus] and Romanticism. As a

Wissenschafts-paradigm historicism was based on Hegel’s ‘basic historical-

philosophical tenet: the historical changeability of the idea and the nature of art’,75

while the idealist ‘philosophy of history’ enabled all historians to claim ‘an objective

knowledge [Erkenntnis] of the historical totality’.76 However, the dominant mode of

general history writing after 1820, most closely associated with Leopold von Ranke,

in no way adhered to Hegel’s notion of a dialectical progression, but rather to its

opposite, to the self-sufficiency / self-reliance / independence [Eigenständigkeit] of

historic individualities, be they persons, nations or epochs’.77 Crucially, Ranke’s

historicism entailed the belief in the possibility of value-free scientific objectivity,

based on the non-commitment / Interesselosigkeit position of the researcher.78

This, however, would not suffice for the new pursuit of art history. One may

cite the well-known contention that we always bring our own preconceptions to

bear on what we say about the past, or, as Prange asks, is it at all possible to

completely remove the gap between past and present?79 She then contends that

objectivity was actually not the principal desire of the historicists. Theirs was in fact

an attempt to ‘appropriate’ the historic objects: using ‘an aesthetic method of a

pictorial and narrative way of bringing the past up to the present’

[Vergegenwärtigung], to create ‘a picture’ of the old times. 80 Winckelmann’s

reception by the Romantics, Johann Herder and Friedrich Schlegel, is fore grounded

here, rather than Hegel’s. Prange stresses again the fundamentals of Romanticism:

‘If formerly the metaphysic of beauty was tied onto rules , it is now being

transformed into an ideology of the movements of the soul which, as a unison of

74 Prange 95. 75 ‘Geschichtsphilosophische Kernaussage: die ’historische Veränderlichkeit von Idee und Begriff der

Kunst’, Prange, 95. 76 ‘Von der idealistischen Geschichtsphilosophie übernahm er den Anspruch auf die objektive

Erkenntis der geschichtichen Totaliät’, 96. 77 Prange, 96, also 129. 78 ‘Wertfreie wissenschaftliche Objtiivität’, Prange, 97. 79 Prange, 97. 80 ‘Ein ästhetisches Verfahren der bildlichen und narrativen Vergegenwärtigung des Historischen‘,

Prange , 98.


19

production and reception, is propagated as a “sensual recreation”, experienced by,

for instance, the museum visitor.’81

The first test case regarding new art history’s metaphysical underpinning

comes with the group from Berlin, with Rumohr and his writings on Italian

painting. ‘Not just the ability to read and critically evaluate sources, which for the

older research established his fame as the founder of the wissenschftliche art history

[…], but also the conservative synthesis, […]the reconciliation of modern

empiricism with the metaphysical traditions of the older art theory à la

Winckelmann and Schelling’ needs to be considered.82 Prange points to Rumohr’s

detailed notes on Schelling.83 She quotes Rumohr to the effect that he realises that

there must be some ‘penetrating / thoroughgoing / all-pervading laws’ but he wants

to pass them by so as to ‘observe this spirit in its activity and application’.84 Prange

goes on quoting Rumohr’s intent: not to present just a ‘series of dispersed

investigations’ but ‘to comprehend art history as a coherent, as it were, organic

whole’.85 Like Bickendorf, Prange points to Rumohr’s concept of the ‘künstlerisches

Wollen’ which Rumohr wants to see as congruent with the entire life of the people

and she sees in this again the celebration of a holistic character of art.86 Once again

all this is interpreted as going against Hegel, and Rumohr, too, is seen as somebody

who adheres to the romantic idea that the essence of art is unchangeable.87

In the case of the other ‘Berliner’, Waagen, and his book on the van Eyck

brothers, Prange points to the completeness and well-ordered nature of this

monograph. Here, too, she stresses the presence of the idea of an autonomous art.

She offers a somewhat daring argument, using a quote from one of Waagen’s

conclusions. Citing Waagen: ‘[With Jan van Eyck] art has come of age and speaks

predominantly in its own language. Only a few artists could enjoy such a position,

to express themselves in their subjectivity to such a degree, to be so purely objective,

as J.v.Eyck.’ Here Prange concludes: ‘This passage makes clear once again, that the

idea of an autonomous art is definitely upheld in historical – critical research’.88

81 `War die Metaphysik des Schönen einst in Regeln festgelegt, wurde sie nun transformiert in eine

Ideologie der seelischen Bewegung, die als Gleichklang von Produktion und Rezeption des

Kunstwerks durch den Galeriebesucher als sein “empfindendes Nachschaffen” propagiert wird‘.

Prange, 105. 82 `Nicht allein in der Fähigkeit zur Quellenlektüre und –kritik, die für die ältere Forschung seinen

Ruhm als Begründer der wissenschaftlichen Kunstgeschichtstsschreibung ausmachte […] sondern in

der konservativen Synthese […] [der] Versöhnung des modernen Empirismus mit den metaphysischen

Tradiitonen der älteren Kunstheorie a la Winckelmann und Schelling.[...], Prange, 111. 83 Prange ,113. 84 ‘… irgend einem durchwaltendem Gesetz gehorchen müsssen’, ‘... diesen Geist in seiner Tätigkeit

und Anwendung betrachten’, Prange, 112 . 85 `Eine Reihe abgerissener Abhandlungnen [...] sondern als ein zusammenhängendes, gleichsam

organisches Ganzes aufzufassen‘, Prange, 113. 86 Prange, 118. 87 Prange, 119. 88 ‘Die Kunst ist bei ihm mündig geworden und redet vornehmlich in ihrer eigenen Sprache. Nur

wenigen Künstlern ist es vergönnt gewesen, sich in dem Grade ihrer Subjektivität zu äussern, so rein

objektiv zu sein, als dem J.v.Eyck’. Prange: ‘Diese Passage macht noch einmal deutlich, dass die Idee

der autonomen Kunst in der historisch-kritischen Forschung durchaus aufrechterhalten wird.’ Prange,

128.


20

With Franz Kugler and his long books, entitled Handbuch, one arrives finally

at the real, the pronounced attempts to be strictly objective. Such has been the

assessment in all twentieth century investigations in art historiography and it was

backed up by Kugler’s own statements when he sees himself as a ‘Praktiker’ rather

than a ‘Theoretiker’.89 However, in his attempts to cover art of all periods and all

countries of the world, with his Weltkunstgeschichte, one may see something of a

Hegelian notion of completeness. Prange argues that here, too, ‘a reasoning that has

been called in which is meant to put together the mass of details as an organic

whole, and does not derive the laws of art history from the phenomena themselves

but constructs them on the basis of a purported higher nature.’90

In Schnaase’s case the comparison with the philosophers can be expected to

be more complex, as Schnaase himself, where he does not actually describe works of

art, courts a wider cultural-philosophical kind of framework. As Prange points out,

Schnaase’s way of analysing the whole of history and art history as running parallel

to the development of a generalised human spirit owes much to Hegel. However,

Hegel’s contention that art at some point ceased to be the highest expression of

society could hardly be accepted by the art historian. Prange stresses that for

Schnaase the principal carrier of the idea of art was the Volksgeist, and the history of

art and its categories is an array of the diverse kinds of Volksgeist.91 Prange finds

some hints of Schelling in Schnasse, too, in the idea of ‘a force analogous to nature’

with which the artist operates and which ‘redeems him from all contingency’,92 all of

which she characterises as adhering to ‘Schelling’s a-historical idea of the creative

genius’.93

In Prange’s pantheon Kugler is followed by Anton Springer. More so than

Kugler and Schnaase, Springer distanced himself from Hegel, claiming himself that

he tried hard ‘to throw down the speculative coat as much as it was still loosely

hanging around my shoulders’.94 From the 1860s Springer gave up the effort to write

comprehensive art histories. The individual work of art, or the individual artistic

personality is now fore grounded and a new aim was the tracing of the details of the

genesis of a work. Prange then briefly points to Springer’s new ways of dealing with

issues of iconography, where she notes his precursorship to Panofsky, something to

come back to in Rößler’s account of Springer. Although Prange admits that

Springer, unlike Schnaase, tended to bypass any questions about ‘das Ganze’, ‘the

whole’ of history, she still finds holistic statements such as the claim for the need for

‘… the historical investigation / revelation of the laws of artistic activities’,95 and she

points to the way in which the iconographer Springer tried to explain motifs by

investigating a broader cultural world.

89 Quoted by Prange, 145. 90 ‘… der aufgerufene kombinierende Verstand, der die Masse der Einzelheiten zum organischen

Ganzen zusamemfügen soll, erschliesst die Gesetze der Kunstgeschichte nicht aus den Phänomenen

selbst, er kosntituiert sie auf der Basis einer angenommemnen höheren Natur […]’, Prange, 147. 91 Prange, 138 – 142. 92 ‘Naturanaloge Kraft … von aller Kontingenz zu erlösen scheint’, Prange, 137. 93 ‘Ahistorische Vorstellung vom Genieschaffen‘, Prange, 143 . 94 ‘Den spekulativen Mantel, soweit er noch auf meinen Schultern lose hing […] völlig abzuwerfen’,

quoted in Prange, 148. 95 `historische Erschliessung der „Gesetze künstlerischer Tätigkeit”’, quoted by Prange, 149.


21

Jacob Burckhardt is cited here first of all with his anti-philosophical

comments; the way he tried to deny any ‘a priori’ standpoint.96 His principal

method, he claimed, was that of Anschauung, or autopsy, learning though looking,

concentrating on what is external. That however, contends Prange, does contain an

a priori: ‘Burckhardt’s very trust in the principle of looking as the means to gain

knowledge is nourished by a religious frame of mind which had found its

systematic foundation in Schelling’s philosophy of art’.97 As regards Hegel, a nadir

appears to have been reached: not only was his spirit lost entirely, Burckhardt never

really linked up his writings on the history of culture with his writings on art. There

is the well-known way in which he stressed in history the quasi accidental

occurrence of the ‘great personality’ which, as Prange points out, also included

some surprising anti-democratic rhetoric.98

At exactly the same time as Prange, the German studies scholar Andrea

Schütte presented her work Stilraume. Jacob Burckhardt und die ästhetische Anordnung

im 19. Jahrhundert, roughly translated as ‘Spaces for Style, Jacob Burckhardt and the

Dispositions of the Aesthetic in the 19th Century’. At first reading this title gives

little away about what amounts to a highly original book which takes the study of

Burckhardt’s work into quite unexpected directions.99 Very basically, Schütte’s

framework is the same as Prange’s. It, too, takes philosophy as the starting point,

but in this case it is Burckhardt’s ‘denial’ of philosophy, or, more generally, his

reluctance to proceed systematically that forms the basis of the argument. However,

this is not, as with Prange, seen to be just hiding common philosophical theorems,

but is now being placed within an epistemology, to be precise, within the

epistemology of uncertainty. First of all, Schütte’s account is peppered by quotes

from the master, which restate again and again that in any of his historical

investigations he does not know how to define the beginning and that one may start

‘just somewhere’, or ‘anywhere’, that it is difficult to perceive any totalities or

linearities; Burckhardt holds that his writing proceeds ‘ruckweise’, or ‘sprung- und

stossweise’, that is, in a ‘jerking fashion’, ‘by jumping and pushing’, in other words:

it is proceeding in fits and starts.100 One attraction of Schütte’s approach is that it

makes any quote from the old authors sound entertaining. She then greatly

elaborates on the problems of history writing, the issues of objectivity and

subjectivity, to which Part II of this report will briefly return. Her conclusion, and

according to her interpretation, also Burckhardt’s conclusion, is that there is no firm

dividing line between history writing and fiction. Using a touch of poetry, or at least

allegory herself, she ends with: ‘Clio, Muse der Geschichte, ist Kalliope, Muse der

96 Quoted in Prange, 153. 97 `Burckhardt’s Vertrauen auf die Anschauung als Erkenntnisinstrument zehrt von religiösen

Denkhaltungen, die in Schellings Kunstphilosophie ihre systmatische Grundlage gefunden haben’.

Prange, 153. 98 Prange, 160. 99 See the Review by Iris Benner in art historicum net,t 2005, nr. 5. Cf. Also Dieter Jähnig, Massstäbe der

Kunst- und Geschichtsbetrachtung Jacob Burckhardts, Basle: Schwabe / Munich: Beck, 2006. Urs

Breitenestein & oth., eds., “Unerschôpflichkeit der Quellen“. Burckhardt neu editiert. Burckhardt neu-

entdeckt, Basle: Schabe / Mucnich Beck 2007. 100 Schütte, Introduction, Schütte 105; Jacob Burckhardt, Weltgeschichtliche Betrachtungen (1905),

J.Burckhardt, Werke, Basel:Schwabe vol. 4 1956, 180, 138.


22

Dichtkunst (poetry).’101 In this sense Schütte prefigures Rößler’s

‘textwissenschaftliche’ approach to the writings of Burckhardt’s contemporaries

Springer and Justi to which we shall come.

After the long general epistemological section, Schütte at last brings in the

visual arts. Searching for links, for the ways of mixing or linking the divergent

elements, an author’s ‘Fugungsvorstellungen’, his or her concepts of jointing (as in

putting together the bricks for a wall) is needed.102 And here an obvious means is

offered by the picture, the painting, where everything is placed next to everything

else. Schütte now provides extensive discussions of a number of theories of

representation, including perspective. On the whole she wishes to stress again the

accidental, the way in which pictures can show links, but also breaks, a ‘heterogene

Konstellation von heterogenen Komponenten.’103 ‘Dense description’ is her

characterisation of Burckhardt’s approach.104 A parallel function to the Bild she sees

in the displays of paintings in the new late eighteenth and nineteenth century kind

of art museum, which, in Schütte’s analysis, showed ‘an aimless, confusing

arrangement’.105 The author also branches out into anthropology by analysing the

natural history dioramas of the taxidermists and finally turns to the notion of

‘Typos’ as an ordering instrument. Her claim that the display in the Pitt Rivers

Museum in Oxford, from 1851 onwards, constitutes the first museum which is

‘typologisch arrangiert’,106 can only be mentioned here. Schütte ends with an

extensive history of the term style to which we shall also return in part II.

Returning to Prange after this long digression – though it was hardly an un-

topical one - the stress on the high-profile persona brings one to the next group,

again to Anton Springer, then to Herman Grimm and Carl Justi. With Grimm’s

writings a new stronger heroisation had set in, especially in his celebrated

biographies of Michelangelo and Raphael. The same applied in more subtle ways to

Justi’s book on Velazquez, to which this report will return. Springer criticised

Grimm’s Michelangelo for carelessness and inaccuracy in its details, no doubt

comparing it with the scrupulosity of his own double-biography paralleling Raphael

and Michelangelo. For Prange all these biographies manifest the continuing

attempts to deal with the general ‘problem of freedom vs. necessity as well as with

the idealist-romantic attempts to solve it by constructing the genius-personality,

whose subjectivity may also claim objective communality.’107 As regards the

interpretations of Velazquez, according to Prange, Justi stresses more the painter’s

ties with the taste of the period than his originality. Justi’s interpretation of Las

Meninas concludes with his contention that its real ‘author and patron’ is the

King.108

101 Schütte, 61. 102 Schütte, 9. 103 Schütte, 175, 204. 104 ‘Dichte Beschreibung’, Schütte, 255. 105

‘Ziellos unübersichtliche Anordnung’, Schütte, 234. 106

Schütte, 263. 107 ‘das Problem von Freiheit und Notwendigkeit als auch sein idealistisch-romantischer

Lösungsversuch durch die Konstruktion einer idealen Persönlichkiet, deren Subjektivität zugleich

objektive Allgemeinheit beanspruchen darf’, Prange, 169. 108 Prange, 172- 173.


23

In the early 1870s the Holbein-Streit, the dispute about a Madonna by Hans

Holbein appeared as a turning point towards the new scientific art history. A choice

had to be made between the version in Darmstadt and the version in Dresden. Now

the promoters of advanced observation, meaning those who practised the more

exacting kind of observation of details, won over those who were still in awe of a

general Classical smoothness, which they saw in the Dresden version; the others

however denounced that version as a seventeenth century copy and pleaded for the

Darmstadt version which looks a little harsher. To this day Holbein’s masterpiece

goes under the name Darmstädter Madonna. Soon the attention to detail took a new

turn in the work of Morelli. Did his way of telling artists apart by examining the

way they painted differently small details, such as ears and hands, constitute an

empirical- scientific method par excellence? Not necessarily, argues Prange:

The enthusiasm for the national idea and the eye for what is characteristic

in a work of art links him to Schelling, even though at first sight the

‘Morelli’ “experimental method” appears distant from philosophical

aesthetics. Morelli even more effectively realised the concepts of Rumohr or

Waagen, in the way he mediated the premise of an unconscious drive for

art with the idea that the manifestations of this drive can be deciphered

with precision in each case, like an individual artistic grammar.109

Prange also points out that Morelli had studied the writings of the Romantics and

Schelling’s philosophy of nature in particular and her contention is at this point not

that far away from what Rößler was to say about the significance of Morelli’s theory

as helping to establish the notion of individual artistic autonomy.110

Prange’s last chapters are of lesser interest in the context here. In her

investigation of new theories in the decorative art, she characterises Owen Jones’s

theories as the ‘romantic derivation of beauty in art from beauty in nature’.111

Semper’s ‘raising of nature and necessity to principles which determine art is owed

to the romantic turn of Winckelmann’s ideas.’112 In Riegl’s work, Prange traces his

concept of the ‘quasi natural’ Kunstwollen back to Schelling and reminds of the use

of a similar term in Rumohr.113 Via Wöllflin’s formalism the book arrives at Dvořak’s

‘Kunstgeschichte als Geistegeschichte’, where, according to Prange, ‘the Wissenschaft

revives earlier romantic ways of thinking, the ways in which Friedrich Schlegel had

109 ‘Die Begeisterung für die nationale Idee und der Blick auf das charakteristische eines Kunstewerkes

verbinden ihn mit Schelling, so weit auf den ersten Blick die Morellische Experimentiermethode von

philosophischer Ästhetik entfernt zu sein scheint. Morelli realisierte sogar noch effektiver als Rumohr

und Waagen Schellings Auffassungen, indem er nämlich die Prämisse eines unbewusst tätigen

Kunstriebs mit der Idee vermittelte, die Äusserungen dieses Tribes seien wie eine jeweils individuelle

künstlerische Grammatik exakt zu entziffern.’ Prange, 176. 110 Rößler, 218. 111 ‘Romantische Ableitung des Kunstschönen aus dem Naturschönen, Prange, 182. 112 ‘Die Überhöhung von Natur und Bedürnfnis zu kunstbestimmenden Prinzipien ist der

romantischen Wendung Winckelammanscher Ideale verpflichtet, Prange, 184. 113 Prange, 190.


24

been ‘rejecting the formal criteria of academic appreciation so as to return to a

religiously deepened language of art’.114

Prange under the spotlight

Prange’s book was destined to create serious attention and controversy. An incisive

review by Henrik Karge mixes general praise with strong reservations in detail. ‘The

history of art history has seldom been analysed on such a level of reflection and

with such incisive and original arguments’, although at times, Karge writes, the

reader could feel that complex developments may have been sacrificed for the ‘unity

of the thought-construction.’ In particular, Prange’s continuous stress on

Romanticism does not go unchallenged. It could have the effect of obscuring the

very different ‘couleurs’ of scholars like Kugler, Schnaase, Burckhardt, Springer,

Semper and Riegl and more generally it may prevent the recognition of the

momentous changes in the mentality of the nineteenth century. As far as Karge’s

‘own’ author, Schnaase, is concerned, he rejects Prange’s attempt to place him close

to ‘Schelling’s ahistorical idea of the genius’s creativity’ and her attempts ‘to fix art

to idealised constants in nature, in Schelling’s and Rumohr’s way,’ Karge finds

‘completely misleading’.115

Locher’s book, as was stressed above, must be seen as broadly agreeing with

Prange in many important respects. In the afterword of his new edition he briefly

refers to Prange, though he remains ambivalent. One feels that he is fending off an

attack on his work for not delving enough into the philosophy of art, stating that in

his book ‘this connection was intentionally kept in the background in favour of

focusing on the special kind of the aesthetic judgement in art history.’116

In the Introduction to the next book to be reported here, Johannes Rößler

also devotes a paragraph to Prange’s book and gave it a thoroughly mixed

reception: ‘Prange rightly criticises history of science-specific points of view which

polarise between philosophical aesthetics and empirical procedures’. However, he

concludes that the mono-causal tracing of the Kunstwissenschaft back to a ‘Romantik-

Paradigma’ results in an underrating of the ‘inherent dynamics and the innovative

potential of the later formations of theory.’117 Quite a harsh judgement, considering

114 ‘Kehrte die Wissenschaft zu den romantischen Grundsäzten einer religiös vertieften Sprache der

Kunst zurück’. ‘Wie einst Friedrich Schlegel die formalen Kriterien akademischer Kunstbetrachtung

ablehnte, [...] um sich romantishen Grunsäzten einer religiös vertieften Sprache der Kunst

zuzuwenden’, Prange, 215. 115 Karge: ‘Selten ist bisher die Geschichte der Knstgeschichte auf derart gedanklichem Niveau und in

derart prägnanter und eigenständiger Argumentation durchdrungen worden’; ‘Geschlossenheit des

Gedankengebäudes’; ‘ahistorische[r] Vorstellung vom Genieschaffen’; Schnaase‘s Fixierung der Kunst

auf idealisierende Naturkonstanten im Sinne Schellings und Rumohrs‘; ‘radikale Verdrehung’. Henrik

Karge, Rezension von Regine Prange, Die Geburt der Kunstgeschichte ....,2004, in:

http://www.sehepunkte.de/2007/05/8083.html 116 ‘War diese Verbindung absichtsvoll in den Hingteregrund belassen, zugunsten der Fokussierung

auf die eigensinnige Art des ästhetischen Urteils in der Kunstgeschichteä’, Locher, 528. 117 Prange kritisiert zu Recht wissenschaftshistorische Sichtweisen, die zwischen philosophischer

Ästhetik und Empirie polarisieren […],Rößler, 5. ‘Die monokausale Herleitung der Kunstwissenschaft

aus einem “Romantik-Paradigma” bedingt, dass die Eigendynamik und das innovative Potential

späterer Theoriebildung unterschätzt werden.’ Rößler, 5.


25

that Prange’s analysis of the writings of Justi, in particular, had prepared the ground

for Rößler at least in a few respects. However, Rößler’s critique gives a good hint as

to how he wants to see things himself.

How to write the New Art History (Rößler)

Rößler’s title ‘The poetics of art history’ first of all comes as a hefty provocation. It

would probably have sounded deeply disturbing to at least one of Rößler’s two

protagonists, Anton Springer, who was considered the pioneering arch-empiricist

among his colleagues. As has just been stressed again, the starting point of all the

three books is the rejection of a categorical kind of division between ‘aesthetics‘ and

‘history’ - of the attempts to play them off against each other. Locher’s proposal -

reported at the beginning as setting the tone of this report - was that absolute value-

freedom was never actually achieved. Rößler takes a further step in this direction:

‘The crossing point between historicisation and aesthetics finds its place in the art

historian’s ways of presenting his or her material and findings.’118 Here

‘presentational method’ actually refers to a broader notion of writing, anything that

concerns methods in general history writing and even in fictional writing. A key

literary term is ‘the organisation of the text’.119 Rößler thus blurs the borders

between history, including art history, and fiction in a way reminiscent of the work

of Hayden White. Rößler’s subtitle: ‘Anton Springer, Carl Justi und die ästhetische

Konzeption der deutschen Kunstwissenschaft’ can thus be taken to deal with both

philosophical aesthetics and with the literary nature of the writings, that is with the

‘presentational [darstellungsaesthetisch[en] qualities’, with the literary-aesthetic

qualities of art historical text as such. Here, one may cite Prange who indicates a

similar kind of thinking where she refers to Hegel who uses ‘pictorial and narrative

kinds of aesthetic methods to bring the past up to the present’.120

Rößler’s book comes as a double monograph, or biography. A further

mighty contemporary figure, Herman Grimm, the new Ordinarius, or full professor

in Berlin from 1873, chiefly known as the writer of powerful biographies of

Michelangelo and Raphael, is partly dealt with by Rößler here. Suffice it to mention

Grimm’s desire to attain literary grandeur, seemingly to the detriment of factual

precision, for which some of his colleagues, including Springer, would not forgive

him.121

The first, more important and more multifaceted figure is Anton Springer.

While always being mentioned with respect in the older histories of art history,

Springer was never given the ranking of Rumohr, Schnaase or Burckhardt, thus he

is missing from Pfisterer’s choice of 2007, too. Partly this was due to way in which

there appeared little to say about his assumed strict empiricism; empiricism was

treated as a methodological virtue but not as a genuine methodological innovation,

118 ‘Die Schnittstelle zwischen Historisierung und Ästhetik [...] findet ihren Ort in den

Darstellungskonzeptionen der Kunsthistoriker’. Rößler, 6. 119 ‘Textorganisatorisch’, Rößler, 111. 120 ‘Ein ästhetisches Verfahren der bildlichen und narrativen Vergegenwärtigung des Historischen’,

Prange, 98. 121 For Grimm see also Johannes Rößler, ‘Erlebnisbegriff und Skioptikon: Herman Grimm und die

Geisteswissenschaften and der Berliner Universität’, in Bredekamp / Labuda 2010, 69-90.


26

a point to come back to in Part II of this report. The same can also be said about the

other factor in Springer’s biography, the institutional one, Springer having been the

inaugurator of the first three proper teaching posts, i.e. chairs, in Germany: Bonn in

1860, Strasbourg in 1872 and Leipzig in 1873. The large number of his pupils made

up much of the next generation of art historians.

Art history had now become a science conducted in its proper departments

in the universities, led by bona-fide specialist in their fields. It was the special

methodological statements which occurred only from the 1890s onwards that caught

the attention of all later historians of art history. For Rößler, such a scenario appears

simplistic. The decades before 1890 were intellectually as challenging as any other.

One paradox was that these ‘first’ proper art historians could hardly be seen as

specialists at all; Springer’s background as well as his continuing activities outside

the field were particularly rich and diverse. His links with other academic fields

were always at the highest level. Rößler takes this diversity as an opportunity to

delve into those complex intellectual backgrounds wherever he can, combining

philosophy, the philosophy of history, aesthetics, literary theory and much else. It is

a very discursive history of ideas which differs from the more usual procedures,

whereby one takes a single statement, preferably a programmatic-sounding one,

and then searches through other statements to locate any follow-ups, something that

would particularly suit the subsequent ‘mature’ art history, such as Wölfflin’s, who

pronounced on its distinct methods, its rules and how everybody should proceed.

For Rößler any statement of his protagonists contains interesting aspects, and that,

most importantly, includes all their descriptions and analyses of the actual works

themselves.

By way of introduction a slightly shortened table of contents of the section

on Springer might be helpful to gage the scope of Rößler’s work:

‘Anton Springer: Realistic Classicism. Methodology and Presentation in

Anton Springer.

One: [introductory] Between Wissenschaft , politics and aesthetics …

Two: Realist Criteria of art appreciation (Kunstbetrachtung)

From the aesthetics of the period of Revolution to realism

(1845-1858)

Empirical art history and dialectical conception I:

Raphael and Michelangelo as exponents of stylistic synthesis

Empirical art history and dialectical conception II:

About the relationship between photography and the

aesthetics of production

Three: Idealrealistische Wissenschaft:

The Stanza della Segnatura and a new Iconography

After-effects of the critique of allegory

Springer’s critique of Passavant and J.W.J. Braun

Realism and iconography

Art history according to texts: Ways of describing and

concepts of presentation (Darstellung …), 1867, 1878 and

1883, rhetorical, narrative, hermeneutical


27

Summary

Four: The reform of writing art history:

Anton Springer and poetological thinking after 1848

Liberalist historiography and programmatic realism

‘Written from our shared ways of thinking’

The cultural-historical “tableau” [“Bild”] as a structural model

in the work of Gustav Freytag and Otto Jahn

Springer’s Bilder aus der neueren Kunstgeschichte (1867): Work

[used here as political term] and [national-political] tendency

Five: Anton Springer: the Historiographer:

Aesthetic presentation (Darstellung) in the magnum opus:

Raffael und Michelangelo

Reconciled contrast.

The concept of the Renaissance in the parallel biography.

Springer and the realist reflection of presentation

(Darstellung) to 1878

The evidence of life: About the discussion of biography in

the Grenzboten [journal] - circle

Springer vs. Grimm:

Dramatic vs. symbolic narrative configuration:

Dramatic narrative configuration in the parallel biography

Symbolic narrative configuration in the Life of Michelangelo by

Herman Grimm

Conclusion:

Narrated history of culture: Soll und Haben [novel by Gustav

Freytag] as a formal model.122

There appeared to be no room for an actual biographical chapter on Springer

but the important factors of his career emerge throughout. A native of Prague,

Springer migrated early to Germany. In Tübingen he obtained his doctorate under a

philosopher who specialised in aesthetics, the Hegel-adherent Friedrich Theodor

Fischer (Springer’s topic being Hegel’s philosophy of history). At the same time he

had become a left-liberal journalist, even agitator, which led him to denounce

Catholic romanticism and medievalism. After 1848 Springer turned, like so many of

his fellow rebels, towards a more stolid ‘national-liberal’ conservatism. He now kept

close contacts with Gustav Freytag, then Germany’s most popular writer of

historical fiction, and a fairly right-wing one at that. Probably the most important

factor that Springer brought to art history from his other activities was the quality of

his writing. From the 1850s onwards it frequently received high praise. Very

recently Michel Espagne, in his Histoire de l’art comme transfer culturel. L’itineraire

d’Anton Springer, has provided a great deal more detail about Springer’s life and

environment.123

One of the characteristics of Rößler’s discursive approach vis-à-vis the ideas

and thought processes is that it is hard to single out and neatly outline any one

122 German version in Appendix. 123 Paris: Belin 2009; see review by Rößler, Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 74, 4, 2011 582-587.


28

concept. A most important procedure and value is empiricism. Springer’s own

statements in this respect do not appear to be of too much help. In his usual manner

of the elegant phrase he claimed to occupy the ‘right middle ground between

shameless construction and raw empiricism’. Rößler claims that the term positivism,

which is sometimes attached to Springer’s outlook, is not suitable, as Springer seems

to have studied neither Taine nor Mill. What does come under empiricism for

Rößler is the way in which Springer uses a new method of explaining a work by

way of tracing its genesis through a succession of preliminary drawings. The

historian conducts an ‘empirical survey’ (Rößler) of the genesis of the work whereby

the aesthetic experience is no longer that of a work which appears removed into

timelessness, but the experience of an artistic process of creation which is verifiable

with its chronological sequence and through its materials (sketches etc.). However,

Rößler holds that Springer does not, when dealing with a sequence of drawings, go

for a ‘simple description’ as it was demanded in contemporary science, or for a

sense of linear ‘progression’, but he adopts a more complex ‘dialectical process’ of

going backwards and forwards so as to achieve a new sense of intensification.124

Only a few complexes of Springer’s contribution may be briefly singled out

here: the issue of realism, the changes in the analyses of works by Raphael, the

definition of iconography and the category of biography. Rößler makes much use of

the terms ‘Idealrealismus’ ’and ‘realistischer Klassizismus’. The former has much to do

with a combination of world views prevalent in the 1840s, a synthesis of

Feuerbach’s materialism, Hegel’s dialectics and Schelling’s philosophy of nature.125

Springer also admired the new kind of realist history painting of the 1840s, and was

especially impressed by its tendency of rendering ‘full, sensuous personages’.126 Yet

from the 1850s Springer stressed that ‘naked naturalism’ or colour for its own sake

had to be tempered with idealism, even Classicist idealism.127 From the 1850s

Springer contributed frequently to the middle-brow journal Grenzbote, such as his

‘Bilder aus der neueren Kunstgeschichte’, containing diverse chapters on Italian

Renaissance art.128 The title indicates the closeness of his approach to that of his

literary colleagues and their ‘kulturgeschichtliche Bilder’.129 While based on a careful

use of all sources, in their actual presentation these texts might well incorporate

elements of the ‘accidental’ in the selection of the facts, in effect the art historian’s

writing might here border on fictionality.130

Springer’s most important single investigations were devoted to the

paintings of Raphael and Michelangelo. Rößler’s term ‘realistischer Klassizismus’

marks out the continuing veneration of Raphael, to be found in so much German art

history throughout the nineteenth century. The sense of the Italian High

Renaissance as a norm, as ‘the status of absolute perfection‘ persisted,131 exemplified

in Springer’s most important book, Raffael und Michelangelo. It seems that Springer

124 Rößler, 43, 46. 125 Rößler, 22. 126 ‘Volle sinnliche Gestalten’, Rößler, 31. 127 Rößler, 32, 50. 128 Eg. ‘L. B Alberti’, ‘Raffael’s Disputa’, or ‘der gothische Scneider von Bologna’. 129 Rößler, 112, 116, cf. Gustav Freytag‘s tales Bilder aus der deutschen Vergangenheit , 1867-. 130 Rößler, 111. 131 ‘Status der absuluten Vollendung’, Rößler, 38.


29

kept on condemning the Catholic Medievalists, the Nazarenes and especially their

recreations of Raphael, as in the later work of Friedrich Overbeck, who showed an

‘un-involved abstraction, a lifeless inwardness and a sense of personal

nothingness’.132

Of great importance is the way Springer kept developing his investigation of

Raphael’s Disputà in the three successive times he dealt with it; it serves to underline

the richness of the methodological spectrum of the time. In 1867 he supplied a

detailed factual description of the scene, emphasising lively action, which was

combined with a strong ekphrasis. In 1878 he dealt fully with iconography which he

broadens out into a wider cultural history. He also concentrated on Raphael’s

preparatory drawings. Springer was the fortunate owner of a copy of the pioneering

photographic publication of the drawings in the British Royal Collections, initiated

by Prince Albert.133 The interpretation of 1883 finally - Rößler calls it the

‘hermeneutische Konzeption’134 - concerns itself with the effects of colour and ‘the

effects of the picture as a whole’, as the rendering of a lively scene of action,135

without paying notice to the ‘literal’ identification of the contents of the scene any

more.

At this point Rößler goes on to construct a comprehensive scheme of

interpretation which he likens closely to the famous three-tier scheme of

iconography proposed by Panofsky some sixty years later. Stage one is the pre-

iconographic identification based on the purely practical observations of the

beholder, say, on observing how a person moves etc. The second stage is the

specialised iconographic identification, especially important in religious and

mythological painting. Throughout, Springer remained sceptical of the Nazarene-

influenced insistence on identifying a painting’s contents as an array of symbols and

allegories and on taking this as the final word.136 Thus he sees the great necessity for

the third step, investigating the broadest background of meanings, such as the

various systems of philosophy and the arguments between them, or the popular

myths which to him explained much about Christian symbolism; in other words, the

level of meaning that Panofsky was to call iconology. The crucial factor is of course

that these steps can be seen both separately and as interrelated.137

The last major issue is the biography of the individual artist. At this point

Rößler could use the recent work by Karin Hellwig, Von der Vita zur

Kunstlerbiographie which traces the genre from the eighteenth to the mid nineteenth

century, to which this report will return briefly in Part II.138 By 1870 the genre rose

afresh, in the context of intensified methodological and ‘textorganisatorisch’ thinking

about the use of the various genres of art historical writing.139 On the one hand there

was the proliferation of the widest-ranging kinds of handbooks. Springer had

132 ‘teilnahmslose Abstraktion’, ‘fleischlose Innerlichkeit’, ‘Gefühl persönlicher Nichtigkeit’, Rößler, 57. 133 Rößler, 40. 134 Rößler, 84 ff.. 135 ‘Wirkungsästhetische Kriterien’, Rößler, 86. 136 Rößler, 90. 137 Rößler, 86 ff. 138 Karin Hellwig, Von der Vita zur Künstlerbiographie (From the Vita to the Artist’s Biography), Berlin:

Akadmie Verlag 2006. 139 Rößler, 111.


30

himself written one of the most successful ones, but the academic ranking of this

genre and their overall intellectual usefulness was already being cast into doubt.

The definitive trend was towards the individual specialised investigation, be it part

of the life of an artist, or, most likely homing in on one or a group of objects,

invariably published as articles in the new specialised periodicals.140 Quoting

Springer himself: ‘Do not generalise but individualise’.141

A dominant issue for the biography is the Romantic stress on individual

genius and the psychological aspect of the actual creative act. With regard to the

former, Springer stated that ‘without the cult of hero there is no writing of

history’.142 With regard to the creative act Springer had provided a model of a more

empirical kind of investigation with his minute observations of the sequence of

Raphael’s drawings. Furthermore, the work of art can be elevated to the expression

of human potential generally143 and the creative act, as a process, becomes a

‘metaphysicum’.144 But while the artist is seen as an agent who is able to react to the

adversities of contingency,145 one may also stress that a biography provided the

opportunity for a different kind of thinking, kind of thinking, one which places the

individual into a wider cultural and historical context, combining the particular

with the general. Lastly, there is the pure literary merit of the genre. Springer

himself maintained that an art historical biography is a ‘created work of art’.146

Springer’s Raffael und Michelangelo, a highly complex work of two intertwined

biographies was held by many to be his best work.147 Such a modern artistic

biography needed quite specific new narrative techniques.148 It had to use the

principles of ‘Kausalnexus’ and it had to be free of the anecdotal and aphoristic.149

Again Springer followed his literary friend Freytag who declared his realist cultural

history-oriented fiction as close to Sachtexte – to non fictional texts.150 In reference to

recent literary research Rößler comes out with the seemingly paradoxical postuate:

‘The [realistic] novel as paradigm of the modern concept of reality’.151 Rößler

undertook a counting of action verbs in Springer’s Raphael – Michelangelo

biography, where their relative frequency evokes a continual movement in space

and time, which brings this text close to the dynamic ideal of narrative in the

‘realklassizistischen’ novels.152 As a distant parallel one is reminded here of the way

in which so many later nineteenth century history books are illustrated, regardless

140 Rößler, 8. 141 ‘Nicht generalsieren sondern […] individualiseren muss man [...]’, quoted in Rößler, 78. 142 ‘Ohne Heroenkultus gibt es keine Geschichtsschreibung’, quoted in Rößler, 127. 143 ‘Das Kunstwerk zum Ausdruck des menschlichen Vermögens zu erheben’, Rößler ,94. 144 ‘Der schöpferisch Akt wird damit als Prozess zum Metaphysikum’, Rößler, 94. 145 ‘Die Fähigkeit des Künstlers als reaktionsfähiges Subjekt die Widrigkeiten der Kontingenz in den

schöpferischen Akt zu integrieren’, Rößler , 94. 146 ‘Kunstschöpfung’, Rößler, 142, 170, 171. 147 Rößler, 125. 148 Rößler, 162. 149 Rößler, 136 139. 150 Rößler, 107, 122 162. 151 ‘Der Roman als Paradigma der modernen Wirklichkeitsauffassung’, Rößler, 171. 152 ‘In der Parallelhandlung die kontunuirliche Bewegung von Raum und Zeit evoziert, die dem

dynamischen Erzählideal der realklassizistischen Prosa nahekommt’, Rößler, 140.


31

of the period they are dealing with, by the nineteenth century painters’

interpretation of the events.

The second part of Rößler’s book deals with Carl Justi and here is the table

of contents, greatly shortened:

Justi: “the translator of art”.

Beyond Hegel. The concept of individuality and the history of art.

Inverted Theology. Winckelmann and his Contemporaries.

The Controversies over Morelli.

Herman Grimm: Goethe’s importance in our Times.

Goethe and Justi. Justi’s fictions. Plato and the pessimistic history (Las

Meninas etc). From contemplation to presentation / principles of

description: Hermeneutics and essayistics.

Image and history.

Rhetoric, intertextuality and aesthetics.

Hippology and aesthetics.

Ironic historicism.153

Slightly younger than Springer, Justi followed him on the chair at Bonn in

1872. In terms of the much smaller number of publications and because of the lack

of a circle of pupils, Justi ranges far behind his predecessor.154 On the other hand

Justi’s Velazquez und sein Jahrhundert (Velazquez and his century) of 1888 reached a

degree of fame that very few other art historical books of the nineteenth century

could equal. The issues it raises in terms of methodology are more complex and

reach deeper than Springer’s. Only a very brief and rudimentary overview can be

attempted here.

What follows refers less to programmatic statements by Justi himself, but

principally to Rößler’s extremely wide-ranging and discursive treatment, tying

together issues of description and ekphrasis with aesthetics, epistemology, antique

philosophy, theology and literature. While Rößler has to state that Justi himself

‘negated any kind of theoretical slant, this anti-programmatic attitude hides an

epistemological awareness which can be put into the context of philosophical and

theological traditions and which at the same time accommodates history-of-science /

wissenschaftshistorische trends of the time’.155 A key issue is again the nature of the

biography, including the relationship between the biographical subject and the

writer. Here, Rößler introduces the philosophy of the theologian Friedrich

Schleiermacher, whose ‘recipe of self-reflexion and the way it is made practical use

153 ‘“Der Dolmetsch der Kunst”: Jenseits von Hegel. Individualitätsgedanke und Kunstgeschichte.

Invertierte Theologie. Winckelmann und seine Zeitgenossen. Der Morelli Streit. Herman Grimms Goethe

im Dienste unserer Zeit. Goethe und Justi. Justis Fiktionen. Platonismus und Geschichtspessimismus.

Von der Anschauung zur Darstellung / Prinzipien der Bildbeschreibung: Hermeneutik und Essayistik,

Bild und Geschichte. Rhetorik, Intertextualitat und Ästhetik, Hippologie und Ästhetik. Ironischer

Historismus. 154 Rößler, 185. 155 ‘Obwohl Justi offiziell jede theoretische Voreingenommenheit negiert, verbirgt sich hinter dieser

Anti-Programmatik ein erkenntnistheoretisches Problembewusstsein, das philophischen und

theologischen Traditionen zugeordnet werden kann und zugleich auf wissenschaftshistorische

Zeitströmungen reagiert’, Rößler, 188.


32

of within what one has recognised as the aims of life, can be made use of in

historical research, too’. 156

Justi’s Velazquez is a book of extreme length and comprehensiveness and

yet it is also eminently readable. Thus it has endured through much of the twentieth

century and the number of its translations, among art historical books, were only

matched by Jacob Burckhardt’s Cicerone.157 On the whole Justi’s task was a far more

demanding one than Burckhardt’s, exploring the art of a country that was, in

contrast to Italy, quite unknown. Justi’s work is astonishingly inclusive, dealing

with all aspects of politics and culture, as well as with the details of patronage and

the content of the works in general terms, into which the artist’s life and the

individual works are carefully embedded. As with Burckhardt and Springer,

everything, or almost everything, is scrupulously sourced, not only in Spain, but

internationally. A special interest is created by the fact that Justi’s enthusiasm about

Velazquez coincided with the sudden Parisian interest in his work, though Justi

only commented on it later.158

Like Springer, Justi carefully worked out the interaction between broader

cultural factors and the artist’s style, but his conviction was rather different and

more extreme: while Springer looked for a synthesis of art and milieu and tried to

identify the meaning of images with people’s beliefs; subject matter for Justi was

about the artist’s ‘spontaneous pictorial invention’.159 Justi was a follower of Arthur

Schopenhauer. It is the individual who wills reality and a historical account is ‘an

enquiry into individuals’.160 All this has an added relevance here because in

seventeenth century Spain the great art the country produced did not coincide with

the happiest period of its history. On the contrary, politics and society appeared in a

state of rapid decline. For Justi, a man of sceptical and even pessimistic leanings this

made the story all the more interesting.

All this comes to a head in the analysis of Velazquez’s last paintings which

are highly unusual in that they depart from the religious and the usual courtly-

stately subject matter. In a section: ‘The description of nunc stans [the eternal now]:

Las Meninas as an aesthetic concept’,161 Rößler summarises Justi’s interpretation of

Las Meninas as ‘a gladdening/enchanting product of an accidental happening’.162

The chief problem is the relationship between the ordinary world that is shown and

the ekphrasis of the work of art, the ‘characterisation of the work as the revelation of

beauty within the real world of the palace’.163 Rößler tries to explain this by bringing

in Schopenhauer again, whom, he says, Justi ‘uses’ implicitly, namely when he

writes that the artist, in order to ‘see’ the ordinary world, must act like a stranger;164

or, as Schopenhauer maintained, the world painted by the artist must be turned into

156 ‘Die Anleitung zur Selbsterkenntnis und zur praktischen Umseltzung des erkannten

Lebensentwurfs auf die historische Forschung übertragen lässt’, Rößler, 208. 157 Rößler, 185. 158 Rößler, 296. 159 ‘Das Spontane im Bildfindungsprozess’, Rößler, 340. 160 ‘“Eine Wissenschaft von Individuen”’, citing Schopenhauer, Rößler, 273. 161 ‘Die Beschreibung des nunc stans: Las Meninas als ästhetisches Concept’, Rößler, 277. 162 ‘Beglückendes Produkt des Zufalls’, Rößler, 277. 163 ‘Die Beschreibung des Bildes als epiphanes Moment des Schönen in der realen Welt des Palastes’,

Rossler, 278. 164 Rößler, 280.


33

an ‘object of contemplation’.165 Rößler underpins this further with Schopenhauer’s

claims that ‘the subjectivity of the spirit dissolves itself through its complete

objectivisation in contemplation’,166 in effect uniting subject and object, and this

applies to both the creator and the beholder. In such a way the revelation of the idea

of beauty167 is achieved as well as a depiction of the scene in the atelier in a ‘pure

and objective way’.168

A special nugget in Justi’s Velasquez book, which could be - according to

one’s standpoint - most disturbing, when applying the principles of a truth-telling

Wissenchaft, or tantalisingly interesting when judging the book as a work of

literature: firstly there is the ‘Dialogue on Painting’,169 in which a number of Roman

painters discuss approaches to art and, secondly, further on in Justi’s book, one

finds a long letter which the artist wrote back to his family from Rome.170 Both these

sections are totally Justi’s own inventions, though he does not acknowledge this

fact. Neither did any of his early readers seem to have discovered it. Finally Justi

confessed and was duly accused of having damaged the integrity of German

Wissenschaft.171

But why not? In twenty pages Rößler provides a complex analysis of these

texts, using epistemological arguments and those derived from literary

presentational techniques. While admitting that what Justi did would not have been

allowed in any professional writing after 1900,172 in the context of the basic outlook

shared by all three books reported here, by Locher and by Prange, too, namely that

one should not, and cannot, insist on too rigid a separation between fictional and

objective-scientific texts, one may begin to accept Justi’s fictions as a kind of

‘literarisation’, serving the understanding of at least some of the overall arguments

in the historical discussions on art. Rößler’s conclusion about the fakes is here given

in full:

Conclusion:

If one returns once again to the starting point of the methodological

controversies of 1880, one realises that the fictional sources inserted into the

biography of Velazquez, may, last but not least, be understood when

diagnosing them against the background of the time. Justi’s ideas of

presenting the issues gained their contours in the immediate proximity of

the dispute about the right connoisseurial procedure, whose protagonist

was Giovanni Morelli. While Morelli, with the help of the fiction of a

“Russian” and through openly ridiculing the adversary brought about a

polarising constellation, Justi included the polemical impulse into his

165 ‘“Gegenstand der Contmplation”’, Rößler, aftrer Schopenhauer, 280. 166 ‘ … hebt sich die Subjektivtiät des Geistes durch seine volkommene Objektivierung in der

Anschauung auf’, Rößler, 284. 167 ‘Die Offenbarung der Idee des Schöenen’, Rößler, 285. 168 ‘Rein und objektiv’, Rößler, 285. 169 ‘Intermezzo: Dialog über die Malerei, in: ‘Erstes Buch’. 170 In: ‘Drittes Buch’, ‘Rom im Jahre 1630’. 171 ‘Die Ehre deutscher Wissenschaft’, Rößler, 233. 172 Rößler, 233.


34

presentation by reflecting, in his fictional history, on his rejection

[Ablehnung] of the search for influences, the rejection of compilation and of

the busy search for documents: Velasquez met neither a Poussin, nor a

Bernini, nor a Pietra da Cortona in Rome, not even an aged modish painter,

such as the Cavalliere d’Arpino. The picture which, for reasons of

conducting a dialogue, is central in the dialogue, the Guadalupe de

Ynsausti, is of little art historical significance, as are, in the letter, the

miniature carvings of Sigmund Laire or the lost comedies of Sancho de Paz.

What really lends explanatory force to the two passages is the fact that

Justi lent them a double-coding. They fulfil in a strategic academic

[wissenschaftliche] way the function of safeguarding the research-

achievement against unauthorised appropriation/invasion [Zugriff] from

outside. By fictionalising contingent and relegated [ausgeschiedenes]

material the historical principles of source-critique were ironised, so that

any form of adaptation would be directed against the person who adapted

them. On the other hand, the fictionalisation had in fact become, for Justi, a

necessity which resulted from a qualitative, internal criterion of

presentation, in the way it became a part of the representational

[darstellerischen] strategy for the conquering of contingency. The

occasionalistic [okkasionalistisch]-biographical linking of the individual

substance and the accidental causes [äusseren Gelegenheitsrursachen],

which for epistemological reasons could not be identified, could, in the last

instance, only brought to a complete and plausible comprehension / re-

enactment [Nachvollzug], by giving the accidental happening [Zufall] the

place which it was denied by strictly scientific standards: that of fiction.173

Stefan Muthesius taught at the University of East Anglia and published on 19th and

20th century architecture and design in England, Germany and Poland. His latest

book is The Poetic Home. Designing the 19th Century Domestic Interior, Thames and

Hudson 2009.

[email protected]

173 Rößler, 254. German Version In Appendix


35

Appendix:

Prange pp 94-5

Zusammenfassung

Der heutzutage wieder zur Diskussion gestellte autonome Kunstbegriff

entstand im 18. Jahrhundert. Er war das Ergebnis einer neuen Wissenschaft

der Wahrnehmung und des Schönen, die Baumgarten als neue Disziplin der

Philosophie einfu hrte und >Ästhetik< nannte. Hatte die antike und

neuzeitliche Wissenschaftslehre dem rationalen Erkennen und Wissen stets

eindeutig Vorrang vor der sinnlichen Erfahrung verliehen, emanzipiert die

Ästhetik das Sinnliche zu einem intellektuellen Vermögen, das zugleich den

Menschen sittlich >bessern< sollte. Die ästhetische Erfahrung begann damit

die Stelle der Religion einzunehmen; Kunst und Bildung wurden zu

exemplarischen bu rgerlichen Werten erhoben. Im wesentlichen hat sie Kant

mit seiner Theorie des Geschmacksurteils und des Genies philosophisch

begru ndet. Die Autonomie der >schönen Kunst< ist ein Ergebnis seiner

>Kritik der Urteilskraft<. Schellings und Hegels idealistische

Kunstphilosophien entwickelten auf dieser Grundlage

systematische Gesamtdarstellungen, die der Kunst als einer Form der

Erkenntnis hohen Wert zumessen und ihre historische und gattungsmäßige

Differenzierung auf die Konstitution der Kultur und ihren Fortschritt

beziehen. Vor dem Hintergrund des Zerfalls der alten Metaphysik, mit dem

auch die Kunst ihre lebendige Funktion im Kult verloren hatte, eröffneten

diese 'beiden Philosophen zwei konträr angelegte Wege in die moderne

Kunstdiskussion, die bis heute noch ihre entscheidenden Impulse

beschreiben. Die Alternative heißt verku rzt gesagt >Natur< oder

>Geschichte<: Schellings romantische Kunstphilosophie fu hrt den

moralistischenAnsatz der Kantischen Ästhetik in einem verstärkt religiösen

Sinne fort. Das künstlerische Genie arbeitet >.wie die Natur<; es stellt in

seinen Produkten eine urspru nglich vorhandene Einheit von Subjekt und

Objekt wieder her und macht in seinen Werken das Absolute der

Anschauung zugänglich. Das Kunstwerk ist somit Vorschein einer besseren

Wirklichkeit, in der die alte Einheit von Subjekt und Welt wiederherges!ellt

sein wu rde. Hegel dagegen verabschiedet sich von der romantischen Idee,

das mythische Zeitalter sei in der Kunst zu erneuern. Seine

Vergangenheitslehre historisiert die Kunst. Sie ist gemäß seiner

Geschichtsphilosophie nur eine Etappe des menschlichen Geistes, die durch

die höhere Stufe des philosophischen Begriffs abgelöst werde.

Kunstwissenschaft folgt somit aus dem Ende der metaphysisch bestimmten

>autonomen<Kunst. Hegels konsequent-geschichtliche Interpretation der

Kunst und ihrer Gattungen bildet die Grundlage der nun einsetzenden

Entwicklung des Faches. Dennoch wird eher Schelling’s >Konstruktion des

Universums in der Kunst< für das Selbstbewusstsein der Kunstgeschichte

wirksam, die sich im Geist der Romantik gegen das Hegelsche Verdikt vom

>Ende der Kunst< stemmt.

Rößler Inhaltsverzeichnis


36

Vorwort .....

I. Einleitung

II. Realistischer Klassizismus.

Methodik und Darstellung bei Anton Springer

1. Zwischen Wissenschaft, Politik und Ästhetik:

Anton Springer im Kontext .

1.1. Zur Forschungssituation und Fragestellung

1.2. Zur Vorgehensweise und Textauswahl ..

2. Realistische Kriterien der Kunstbetrachtung

2.1. Von der Revolutionsästhetik zum Realismus 1845-1858

2.2. Empirische Kunstwissenschaft und dialektische Konzeption I:

Raffael und Michelangelo als Exponenten der Stilsynthese . . .

2.3. Empirische Kunstwissenschaft und dialektische Konzeption 11:

Zum Verhältnis von Fotografie und Produktionsästhetik

3. Idealrealistische Wissenschaft:

Die Stanza della Segnatura und die Neubegru ndung der Ikonographie

3.1. Nachwirkungen der Allegoriekritik:

Springers Auseinandersetzung mit den Deutungen Passavants und

J. W. J. Brauns .

3.2. Realismus und Ikonographie .

3.3. Kunstgeschichte nach Texten:

Beschreibungs- und Darstellungskonzeptionen 1867, 1878 und 1883

a) Die rhetorische Konzeption 1867 ....

b) Die narrative Konzeption 1878

c) Die hermeneutische Konzeption 1883

3.4. Zusammenfassung und Ausblick .

4. Die Reformierung der Kunstgeschichtsschreibung:

Anton Springer und das poetologische Denken nach 1848

4.1. Liberale Historiographie und programmatischer Realismus

4.2. "Aus unseren gemeinsamen Gesinnungen heraus geschrieben":

Das kulturgeschichtliche "Bild" als Strukturmodell bei Gustav Freytag

und Otto Jahn 103

4.3. Profil einer darstellerischen "Scheidemu nze":

Springers Bilder aus der neueren Kunstgeschichte (1867) 112

4.4. Arbeit und Tendenz bei Freytag, Jahn und Springer . . . . 117

5. Anton Springer, der Historiograph:

Ästhetische Darstellung im Hauptwerk Raffael und Michelangelo (1878) 125

5.1. Versöhnter Gegensatz.

Die Renaissancekonzeption in der Parallelbiographie . . . . 130

5.2. Springer und die realistische Darstellungsreflexion bis 1878 135

5.3. Evidenz des Lebens.

Zur Biographie-Diskussion im Grenzboten-Kreis 142

5.4. Springer versus Grimm:

Dramatische und symbolische Erzählkonfiguration . . . . . . . . . . 146

a) Die dramatische Erzählkonfiguration in der Parallelbiographie 148

b) Die symbolische Erzählkonfiguration im Leben Michelangelo's

von Herman Grimm 157


37

c) Conclusio . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 166

5.5. Erzählte Kulturgeschichte: Soll und Haben als formales Modell 169

Rößler

c) Conclusio, p 254

Kehrt man nochmals zu dem Ausgangspunkt der methodischen

Kontroversen von 1880 zuru ck, wird erkennbar, daß die in der Velazquez-

Monographie eingefu gten Quellenfiktionen nicht zuletzt vor einem

zeitdiagnostischenHintergrund zu verstehen sind. Justis Darstellungsauffassung

konturierte sich in unmittelbarer Nähe zu den useinandersetzungen um das richtige

kennerschaftliche Verfahren, deren Protagonist Giovanni Morelli war. Während

dieser mit der Fiktion des "Russen" und der offenen Verhöhnung des Gegners eine

polarisierende Konstellation herbeifu hrte, nahm Justi den polemischen Impuls in

seine Darstellungsauffassung auf, indem er seine Ablehnung von Einflußforschung,

Kompilatorenturn und Dokumentensucherei in der Geschichtsfiktion

reflektierte:Velasquez trifft in Rom keinen Poussin, keinen Bernini, keinen Pietro da

Cortona, nicht einmal einen in die Jahre gekommenen Modemaler wie den

Cavaliere d'Arpino; das dialogtechnisch zentrale Bild der Guadalupe de Ynsausti

war so wenig von kunsthistorischem Belang wie im Brief die Miniaturschnitzereien

des Sigmund Laire oder die verschollenen Komödien des Sancho de Paz. Was

deshalb beide Passagen so aussagefähig macht, ist das Faktum, daß ihnen Justi eine

doppelte Codierung widerfahren ließ: einmal erfu llten sie wissenschaftsstrategisch

die Funktion, die Forschungsleistung gegen den unbefugten Zugriff von außen

abzusichern; mit der Fiktionalisierung von kontingentem und ausgeschiedenem

Material wurden die historistischen Prinzipien der Quellenkritik ironisiert, sodaß

jede Form der Adaption sich gegen den Adaptor selbst richten mußte. Zum anderen

aber war die Fiktionalisierung fu r Justi schon aus einem qualitativen, internen

Darstellungskriterium zur Notwendigkeit geworden, indem sie Teil einer

darstellerischen Strategie der Kontingenzbewältigung wurde: Der okkasionalistisch-

biographische Konnex von der individuellen Substanz und den aus

erkenntnistheoretischen Gru nden nicht identifizierbaren äußeren

Gelegenheitsursachen konnte letztendlich nur dadurch zum vollständigen und

plausiblen Nachvollzug gebracht werden, daß der Zufall als bewegende Kraft jenen

Raum erhielt, der ihm nach streng wissenschaftlichen Maßstäben versagt blieb: Den

der Fiktion.‘

towards an exakte kunstwissenschaft’(?)* a report on some ... · actual style of writing and of...

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